A Faster Internet… By Google?

Yes, that's right, the search engine is looking to speed up the internet by optimizing the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that underpins it.

Google technicians want to apply several tweaks to the TCP stack in order to implement this. In a blog post, Yuchung Cheng explained that one of the things that really slow things down is latency and the key way to reduce that is to reduce the number of round trips, by reducing the number of packets sent when initiating a connection. Also, the timout for missing packets is currently set at three seconds. While this was appropriate for the vastly slower network links of a couple of decades ago, it's too long now and one second is more appropriate.

Other improvements include a better packet loss recovery algorithm that works better with network congestion and better error recovery in noisy mobile environments.

Finally, there's no danger of incompatibility, as Google's improved TCP will be available in parallel with the current version and will only kick in when the client computer also supports it too.

For full details of this innovation, see the Google blog.

Source: PCWorld