Few readers will remember, but it was almost two years ago that Google announced it was experimenting with a new way to speed up Internet traffic using a protocol it calls QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections). Now, Google says the results of that experiment are promising, and that it’s successfully boosted web traffic from its servers using the new protocol.

QUIC is an experimental low-latency data transfer protocol that in theory will make the Internet much faster to load. It’s based on another protocol called UDP – commonly used by gaming and streaming services – which is much faster but less reliable than the standard TCP protocol used by most of the world’s websites today.

Most websites use TCP because it offers guaranteed reliability, though that comes at the cost of a large overhead. A standard TCP connection makes three roundtrips to a server in order to grab webpages, and that takes time. But QUIC is smarter – it’s able to remember which servers it’s talked to before, which means it can make instant connections after its first visit. The protocol also offers congestion control for when certain sites are receiving too much traffic, and automatic re-transmission of lost data, which brings back some of the reliability found in TCP.

Previously, Google came up with the SPDY protocol as an alternative, which became standardized with the advent of HTTP/2. However, SPDY relies on TCP, which means it suffers from many of the same problems.

Could Google simply have redesigned TCP? Perhaps, but many operating systems already have the code for TCP and UDP built into their kernels, and that’s something Google has no control over.

“QUIC allows us to test and experiment with new ideas, and to get results sooner,” Google said in a blog post. “We are hopeful that QUIC features will migrate into TCP and TLS if they prove effective.”

While QUIC only provides a load time increase of about three percent on the Google Search engine, YouTube sees a vast improvement. QUIC users see around 30 percent less buffering compared to TCP, and Google believes that even the slowest connections should be able to see a marked improvement when watching videos or viewing unoptimized Internet pages.

Google is still ironing out the problems with QUIC, but if everything goes to plan it will eventually propose HTTP/2-Over-QUIC as a new Internet standard to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Google says about half of all requests made by its Chrome browser are now processed over QUIC. For those who are interested, Google has offered a browser extension which lets you know exactly when you are connected via QUIC.

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