0 Why DSL Sucks
Companies like Qwest and AT&T both suffer from the age old criticism of slowness and poor consistency in bandwidth. DSL isn’t slow, it’s the DNS servers that cause slowness.
I’ve been using wireless in my building (shhh! don’t tell anyone) and it was gawd awful slow. What was strange is that downloading files was somewhat comparable to that of cable broadband. Simply surfing the web was the only slow link in the chain. So I investigated.
Enter the World of DNS
DNS is translated as Domain Name Server. Every computer that accesses the internet or any network uses DNS to interpret IP addresses. On the internet when you see www.yahoo.com you’re actually accessing an IP address that looks something like this, 12.345.67.8. That’s was DNS does, it interprets IP addresses and attaches them to respective URLs.
It wasn’t surprising to find that DNS performance is highly critical when it comes to surfing the web. DSL companies still have yet to figure this out or rather they have yet to spend the money to improve their DNS servers.
Faster DNS is Free
My investigation turned up a well-known (although unknown to me) DNS company called OpenDNS. You simply follow some easy instructions that allow your computer to use to their DNS server for resolving URLs. The results weren’t immediate by any means, but after a day, the speed over my wireless connection improved drastically or at least enough to actually get some work done.
208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
In your own DNS settings for your network adapter be it wireless or ethernet, you’ll see some IP addresses. Your router or network may issue these addresses automatically depending on your ISP. Simply add those two IP addresses to the list and in a day you should see noticeable speed improvements.
Pretty cool, eh? I sure as heck thought it was!