Surprising facts about DNS lookup times with FiOS and Comcast
08.19.06 - 10:16pm
Over the last couple of years companies have been hyping broadband Internet and saying it is one hundred bajillion times faster than dial-up. What they haven’t been telling you is that the initial latency times between dial-up and broadband are a lot closer than one would think. ISPs(Internet Service Providers) have been investing billions of dollars into their fiber networks however there is a serious flaw in their networks, DNS lookup times.
If you don’t know what DNS servers do for your Internet, go off and read this first. Broadband Internet is really fast due to the width of the pipe while dial-up isn’t so much, broadband connections are essentially the highways of connections while dial-up is more like the dirt roads. Now I mentioned DNS servers above because this is something that both dialup and broadband connections share and this can really make or break your connection. Nominum, a company based around DNS and DHCP solutions, recently released a survey of 8 broadband connections including their ping round trip times, DNS lookup times, and percentage of successful DNS lookups. Now remember that not all connections are equal, Verizion Fios is supposed to be superduper fast featuring a fiber connection to your door while Comcast serves up a connection to a neighborhood as a cable line meaning you share your connection with lots of neighbors. You’d think that the connection with the widest pipe such as Verizon Fios would have the fastest connection but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
The Numbers
Just to give you some quick numbers Verizon Fios had a 168 ms cached DNS lookup time while Comcast had a 33 ms cached DNS lookup time. Now what is really interesting is the un-cached DNS lookup times, Verizon had a whopping 189 ms while Comcast only had 58 ms. Now 189 ms might not sound slow at all but I am pretty certain that my dialup connection was pushing around 220 ms meaning that for click and go browsing Fios could potentially offer similar service to dialup. Now I am not trying to compare Fios to dial-up and say that dial-up is a better deal, I am just pointing out a serious weakness in the Fios network. If you would like to check out the entire document with all the lookup times, drop rates, and other numbers just go here and enter some “registration” information and then download the PDF. The information is rather interesting and you will be rather surprised at the numbers.
Alternatives
Since the DNS lookup times are what constitute the majority of the service times for Fios a good alternative would be to use an alternative DNS service. I highly recommend checking out OpenDNS as their DNS lookup times are quick, the extra features are great, and there is a load of Internet security features designed into the service. Paul wrote up a short article about all the features that are crammed into just changing your DNS servers so go check it out. Don’t let the numbers scare you, broadband connections are super fast, some of them could just use some beefing up of their supporting network.
Thanks. FiOS rocks but the DNS was really slow VS comcast.
Mentioning the disparity between FiOS and Comcast’s surfing abilities, but you failed to mention the other facet of Internet use…loading (up and down). I’m still doing research on actual DL and UL times, but I’m sure that you understand that this is where bandwith starts playing a huge roll. For those users who do not hit hundreds of web pages and hour, but, rather, DL large files, stream video, play high-end games and even use VOIP, bandwith is where it is at. After the connection is made, which service do you really thing cand DL a 500MB movie file faster: Comcast during non-peak times or FiOS during Peak times?
I personally would take a FIOS connection and change over the DNS service to a faster DNS service. Right now our Comcast service has been so unreliable due to the Atlanta service constantly failing that I would take 200ms DNS response times over no service.
Just got Verizon FIOS here in Sarasota, FL and totally agree about the DNS. The Actiontec router does not even show or allow DNS entries… don’t even know what the DNS server(s) are; assuming they’re the 4.2.2.x ones. How do I discover my WAN DNS (ipconfig only shows 192.168.1.1 [the router] as dhcp, gateway and dns)? Do I have to give my LAN PCs static IPs to change DNS servers they use? I know how to do that, no problem but I’d rather change the DNS being handed out by the router like can be done with a Linksys but can’t find it in the Actiontec they gave me (for free and its otherwise pretty sweet). I kept my Comcast cable modem service (yeah I’m geeked out and have 2 kids too , and Comcast’s DNS is much faster than Verizon’s. The Comcast circuit clocks at between 5 & 6mb downstream and surfs much faster than the fios circuit which clocks at over 20mb (blazing for downloads!). I’m thinking of going static w/ the fios gateway and Comcast DNS. What do you think?
Dug a little deeper into this and found out about “OpenDNS†which is pretty kewl; even provided instructions for configuring DNS in the Actiontec router (it was nested deep in the interface where I hadn’t found it!). So now I’m using OpenDNS servers, which are definitely much faster, via DHCP to all my LAN PCs. OpenDNS has other features to benefit web surfers too such as improved “error pageâ€.
Ahh you found the best solution before I had time to respond. I use OpenDNS at my house and it is amazing compared to Comcast’s DNS service, the “page not found” is awesome incase I type in the wrong address. My only gripe is sometimes it simply doesn’t have obscure/new pages indexed so I’ve had to physically find the IP address to connect. I’ve only had that happen once or twice so just a fluke I think.
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