Transfer protocol over UDP
QUIC is a transfer protocol implemented on top of UDP. If you watch your networktraffic casually, you will see QUIC appear as UDP packets.
Based on UDP it also then uses UDP port numbers to identify specific networkservices on a given IP address.
All known QUIC implementations are currently in user-space, which allows formore rapid evolution than kernel-space implementations typically allow.
Will it work?
There are enterprises and other network setups that block UDP traffic on otherports than 53 (used for DNS). Others throttle such data in ways that makesQUIC perform worse than TCP based protocols. There is no end to what someoperators may do.
For the foreseeable future, all use of QUIC-based transports will probablyhave to be able to gracefully fall-back to another (TCP-based) alternative.Google engineers have previously mentioned measured failure rates in the lowsingle-digit percentages.
Will it improve?
Chances are that if QUIC proves to be a valuable addition to the Internetworld, people will want to use it and they will want it to function in theirnetworks and then companies may start to reconsider their obstacles. Duringthe years the development of QUIC has progressed, the success rate forestablishing and using QUIC connections across the Internet has increased.