Google Is Working on Improving TCP, to Boost Internet Speeds for Everyone

Beyond all the politics, Google is a technology company and it's the one doing the most to improve the web, from the roots up. In fact, it now wants to go beyond the web and improve the internet entirely with some changes to the TCP, Transmission Control Protocol, that is the basis of all internet communications, from a Gmail page to VoIP.

Improving TCP, which in Google's dictionary means making it faster, will result in performance improvements felt by everyone using the internet on any device anywhere. It's hard to overstate the significance of this.

That said, changing the underlying protocol of the internet that's been used for decades is not easy and it's certainly not something to be taken lightly.

Still, Google has some of the world's best engineers working for it, including the 'inventor' of the internet, Vint Cerf, who, among other things, worked on the initial TCP/IP protocols.

Google has several proposals for speeding up TCP. Most take advantage of the much bigger bandwidth and faster networks available now to optimize and adapt TCP to these new conditions.

One idea proposed by Google is increasing the initial congestion window to 10. This means that more packets can be sent before and acknowledgement is required, lowering the amount of round trips, from the server to the client and back, thus lowering latency. Google says this increase led to a 10 percent decrease in latency in its test.

Another proposal is to reduce the timeout from three seconds to just one. The faster networks of today mean that one second is more than enough to determine that a packet is loss and to send it again.

Google has a few other proposals. Already, some of them are put into practice, albeit as a proof-of-concept and some have even been included in the Linux kernel. But the goal is working towards standardizing all of these improvements and having them adopted by everyone.