Why QUIC might kill TCP for good
QUIC + HTTP/3 has been “the future” for a while, but until now most deployments were edge cases or just browsers quietly switching protocols under the hood. Media delivery is different, it stresses latency, congestion control, retransmissions, and real-time resilience in ways that show off QUIC’s strengths.
A few things that make me think TCP’s days are numbered (at least for large-scale internet workloads):
QUIC’s user-space implementation means iteration speed that TCP will never match.
Built-in multiplexing avoids the classic “TCP head-of-line blocking” problem.
Encryption as the baseline, not the addon.
Congestion control that works better for streaming and real-time traffic.
If the economics work out for Cloudflare and others, media over QUIC could be the wedge that normalizes QUIC everywhere — not just browsers, but infra, APIs, and even enterprise backends.
Curious if anyone here is already seeing QUIC make TCP irrelevant in production workloads (beyond web browsers)? Or is TCP going to stick around longer than we think, the way IPv4 has?
So how relevant are the benefits you listed (faster development, multiplexing, congestion control) for residental end points? I am sceptical.
But I wonder... if QUIC does end up entirely supplanting TCP, that means it's an entirely different networking scheme. We'd no longer be using TCP/IP at all, but something else. QUIC/IP?