Google has been pushing SPDY for a little while now, and so far I haven’t really seen a good argument against SPDY. Firefox 11 will ship with it, though disabled by default until the bugs are worked out. Now Google is turning its eyes towards TCP. Very logical.
While there are a variety of proposals to speed up TCP floating around, I wonder if Google would be better off just buying FastSoft for Fast TCP and pulling a VP8 style opening up. The reason being that it’s already in use on the web, Google could capitalize on that overnight. There are several TCP congestion algorithms out there, however Fast TCP seems to have the most established customer base, including CDN Limelight who uses it to upload to them.
1 reply on “Google Wants To Make TCP Faster”
Totally on board with this. As always, “legacy” devices will stick around for-ev-ar, but that doesn’t mean a large “modern” user base shouldn’t move forward with innovations like this. Plain TCP is a very, very conservative protocol, which has served it well for a long time, but many of its underlying assumptions might not hold anymore after decades of innovation.