Wesley Howe

I tried this. It works very well, at least for now. Time will tell if they keep up with the demand.

I have a wireless internet service that worked pretty well, although it was a lot of grief getting to that point. But by pointing my DNS at Google, instead of the DNS servers provided by my ISP (the “automatic” ones) things have improved markedly.

Besides a generally “snappier” response to clicks, which may or may not be a quantifiable improvement, there are two places where the improvement is quite solid. The first is problems accessing sites on the first click. I would guess that the ISP DNS server is holding recently accessed addresses in a cache, because the first time each day that I tried to access some of my favorite (but smaller) forum sites I would get a site not found error. Repeating the access attempts a second time usually brings it right up. This happened on enough different sites enough times that I can only assume it is designed with some sort of cache, and is too slow on some network accesses to get the address before a timeout occurs. I suppose a longer timeout value would also fix the errors, too, but who wants the World Wide Wait back?

The other very noticeable improvement I see is playing videos, at least those that are streamed, such as the ones at YouTube. I used to just avoid a lot of them because they would stutter and stop waiting for some more data. It really detracts from the enjoyment of a story when you have to wait for them to finish a sentence a half-dozen times in a 3 minute video. With the DNS changed to Google, the data stream is pretty consistent… an occasional short glitch happens, but videos play well.

I am, for now, pleased. I know some people have some worries about Google maintaining data on them, but all the ISP providers do this, so the question really is about who, not if. I don’t have much private or pirate stuff I am involved with, so I never worry about this (except online commerce, I make sure the site I am using uses HTTPS instead of plain HTTP).