I've been hearing about OpenDNS a lot lately: a solution for slow Xtra connections; Stamatiou calls it über; Lifehacker named it one of the best apps of 2006. Not only faster, but safer (auto-corrects common URL misspellings) and smart (warns against phishing), it's simple to use—just tell your broadband modem the IP addresses of the OpenDNS nameservers.
3 responses to OpenDNS cure for slow net?
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Thanks for the heads-up, Bruce. I'm now trying OpenDNS on my computers (too).
Be interested to hear what your experience is BOK; the DNS servers of my current ISP (Orcon) seemed fairly responsive anyway. The only objective way I can think of for testing this is to use Network Utility (in /Applications/Utilities) assuming you use Mac OS X; enter the IP address 66.102.7.104 (Google) and see what difference OpenDNS makes to the average ping time. Otherwise it's difficult to tease out the effect of server responsiveness when surfing to various websites.
While I use my own dns servers, being a evil genius and all that, I have found it useful at clients, at least in Shanghai, China.
The Chinese DNS servers are typically crappy overloaded boxes, and a little buggy (updates don't happen correctly, sigh).
Upside - it helps where your dns servers suck, but it also introduces some latency, as the opendns servers are further away (and given the nature of the service, on an oversea's hop away). If you are geeky and on a Mac, I'd probably recommend looking at DNS caching locally, but if it isn't an issue, I wouldn't bother.
Pinging won't tell you the difference - DNS servers help in the lookup of the name. So its the initial lookup that would be faster (or slower), not the pings themselves.