Google and OpenDNS Work On Global Internet Speedup 151
Many users have written in with news of Google and OpenDNS working together on The Global Internet Speedup Initiative. They've reworked their DNS servers so that they forward the first three octets of your IP address to the target web service. The service then uses your geolocation data to make sure that the resource you’ve requested is delivered by a local cache. From the article: "In the case of Google and other big CDNs, there can be dozens of these local caches all around the world, and using a local cache can improve latency and throughput by a huge margin. If you have a 10 or 20Mbps connection, and yet a download is crawling along at just a few hundred kilobytes, this is generally because you are downloading from an international source (downloading software or drivers from a Taiwanese site is a good example). Using a local cache reduces the strain on international connections, but it also makes better use of national networks which are both lower-latency and higher-capacity."
Alternately... (Score:4, Insightful)
Google could just not provide a service that inserts themselves into the DNS path. The problem isn't "the internet" or DNS, it's that Google's DNS servers have no relationship to the client systems. If people were using DNS servers that had some relationship to their network -- such as the one provided by their IPS -- then this wouldn't be an issue.
Plus not using Google's DNS gives you a little more privacy. Privacy of course being defined as not having every activity you do on the internet being logged by one of Google's many methods of invading your space (DNS, analytics, search, advertising, blogger, etc.)
I saw the article title and it read.. (Score:2, Insightful)
I think from now on simply replacing the word Google with Evil should be an auto-correct feature.
Re:Ehh.... this is ok, but .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't this little more than an expensive band-aid for the underlying bandwidth problem?
Not really. There is always a finite quantity of bandwidth. It only becomes a "problem" when you have applications which assume infinite bandwidth or are forced to assume this for legal or political rather than technical reasons.
Like, oh let's just say for example, streaming video.
Streaming is the anti-caching. It's a terrible technical non-solution to a legal problem. It clogs the tubes and wastes bandwith by design just to retain control over the obsolete idea of "broadcasting" so that copyright control and advertisements can be retrofitted into the stream.
But doing video right would require re-engineering our entire economy -- which will have to happen sooner or later when the IP crash comes -- so we'd rather just break the Internet by design and then attempt to retrofit some kind of weird fixup after the fact to make some preferred partners work sort-kinda okay.