The foundation of the internet technology that we use today is old and has been due for an upgrade for a long time, guess what? It recently got one. Google has been working on a technology called ‘Quic’ which is a protocol for transmitting data between multiple computers at high speed and with improved security. Quic has the potential to replace the current standard technology- TCP or Transmission Control Protocol. TCP dates back to the year 1974 so you can imagine the boost in performance, speed and reliability after this 2021 upgrade to one of the Internet’s foundation.
However, it is not very easy to understand and replace the entire fundamental structure of the Internet because a lot will be at stake if engineers and researchers do that. There are countless websites, devices, services, algorithms, programs etc. that are dependent on the Transmission Control Protocol technology and are built to this infrastructure and changing all of that would be a big task and nearly impossible to do in a limited time frame.
Anyhow, Google has been working on Quic for the past eight years and finally, it has officially been published as a new standard technology foundation for the internet. The search engine company first announced Quick back in 2013 as an experiment on Google Chrome and its versatility has given birth to upgrading the entire internet foundation.
Quic is secure, fast and reliable when compared to the standard TCP technology and is poised to take charge for the next generation of internet innovations. As and when the world is evolving, the internet has to evolve as well because it has now become the backbone of communication and commerce everywhere. As mentioned in a report by CNET, engineers have spent a lot of time understanding and building Quic. This new technology by Google is capable to use IPv6 for accommodating a significantly larger number of devices on the internet, use HTTPS for secure internet communication and post-quantum cryptography to protect data from future quantum computers.
As mentioned earlier, Google has been testing the technology for the past eight years and during the in-house testing and trials, Quic performed significantly well with search results jumping by 8% on desktop PCs and approximately 4% on smartphones.
Furthermore, Quic is designed to perform the same tasks as TCP but much better. It operates on User Datagram Protocol (UDP) which is much faster and reliable than TCP’s mechanism. However, it does not have the capability to recover lost data packets but Quic uses its separate recovery mechanism to carry out the task faster than TCP.
Quic stands for “Quick UDP Internet Connection” but the IETF does not recognise Quic as an acronym.
