Last weekend it peaked to about 36C here in Vancouver! So how did I spend such a beautiful hot summer weekend? I made my Telus highspeed go 3x faster by changing my DNS servers from Telus’ defaults to the ones provided by OpenDNS.
I’ve always hated Telus’ DNS servers. They are pitifully slow and this weekend I got around to checking out OpenDNS’s public resolvers. You can read all about their anti-phishing, spell checking and other features here. The only thing that matters to me is speed and their resolvers are fast. So how does changing DNS resolvers make Telus highspeed 3x faster?
Well perceived speed is more than just the maximum rate that you can download data. Let’s consider something to be fast by the time it takes from when a link is clicked to when the page finishes loading. To me, fast would be < 2 seconds. The problem is that Telus’ DNS servers add upwards of 4 to 5 seconds to a request resolving each domain name. Only after all the resolving can I start downloading data. For a modern web page, where stuff comes from multiple domains, that meant a lot of pages took upwards of 15 to 20 seconds to load!
By switching over to OpenDNS’s servers my overall browsing experience hugely improved. Since this is MostlyGeek, I wrote a yummy shell script to test the speed differences.
You can get it here, and the test results are here.
Here are the results:
For this test I used randomly generated hostnames to prevent caching to see how long each system would take to resolve a domain it has never encoutered. The primary DNS is my control as nothing should resolve faster than that because there would be no recursion.
I tested OpenDNS’s, Verizon’s public DNS, the CityTel DNS (in Prince Rupert, my hometown), against Telus’. From the result above we can see just how slow the Telus servers are. Wow, almost 8 to 9 times slower.
The other tests I ran were for cached domains: yahoo.com, myspace.com, etc. The results were essentially the same as above. From results, I think the problem with Telus’ resolvers is that the cache is way too small! They have so many people resolving domains off those servers and the cache turn over is so high that nothing stays in the cache for very long.
Also many requests fail and an IP address is never returned! I was nice in my tests that I set timeouts to only 3 seconds (see shell script) and no retries. By default the timeout (before a retry) is around 5 to 10 seconds. So this could mean that either the page doesn’t load or you have to waste upwards of 10 seconds for a DNS request that may never get a response. Very bad. Very unstable servers.
For those that do not trust the rewriting done by OpenDNS, the Verizon servers were a very nice discovery. They are in the range of 4.2.2.1 to 4.2.2.6, and they are extremely fast! Plus the IP addresses are very easy to remember. A very simple change (hack?) with huge return on investment.
On a closing note, if you are or know who administers Telus’ DNS resolvers, please tell them to get their systems spiffed up, or to talk to me. I’ve always wanted to try implementing this!
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Cool to see real-world testing! Thanks for trying OpenDNS.
One note: if you want the speedy, reliable DNS of OpenDNS, but you don’t want typo correction, you can turn it off at http://www.opendns.com/prefs — your choice.
John Roberts
OpenDNS
I would like to thank you for a great article. Being a network administrator myself I have numerous times tried proving to Telus support that their DNS servers are having problems (that in turn result in me waiting for minutes for pages to load). I even resorted to copying Shaw’s DNS servers from my friend’s computer a few times when Telus’ ones completely crapped out on me…
So finally i gave up and decided to do what I should have done in the first place, Google “Telus DNS” – which led me to your blog.
As soon as I logged into my Telus 2WIRE modem and entered OpenDNS free server IPs into the “Broadband DNS” settings (on the 2WIRE 2700HG-E Gateway, located under “Broadband Link” –> “Advanced Settings”) all the sites started opening instantaneously.
Thank you very much for the idea.
i can’t figure out what to put in to each box,
ip address, subnet mask, default gateway, primary server,
secondary server, domain name, hardware name, or hostname. i tried to fill in jus the dns broadband part, but i got an error and sent back to ip address (which i didn’t switch)
any help would be appreciated, thanks joe
Thanks so much for your article. Every telus highspeed user should do this.
Wow im glad i found this article. I have telus high speed extreme and i thought web pages would always take forever to load! Now they are instant! This is great. Thanks, very interesting article.
Thanks! Telus’ DNS were all down at the time of writing this, but thanks to you, I can work again!!
Well, that is why I love my work!!! It is bloody stunning to see that I am not the only one out there that supports the sharing of knowledge and back it up with proof!!!!
Benson, if I had a het on now, I would take it off to YOU!!!
If you are ever in the Toronto area, I’ll buy you a beer!!!!
Thanks for the info!!! Great work!!!!
I tried open dns for several months, it just kept taking longer and longer for web pages to load.
If u really want fast then switch to Ubuntu. gets rid of all the MS bs.
Some improvements have been done on the TELUS DNS Servers. Benson, would it be possible for you to test it again ?
I just switched to OpenDNS (mail.google.com failed to resolve otherwise) and it seems much slower than Telus’ DNS.
Granted, I’ve only been using it for a couple minutes, but it was _that_ much slower. Orders of magnitude slower.
@Chris:
Telus did make some big improvements to their DNS a while back and it did register as faster. The really true way to figure out the best DNS settings for your location is to use namebench (http://code.google.com/p/namebench/).
Run it and it will tell you exactly which DNS servers are the fastest for your location. If you’re using a laptop the google dns resolvers:
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/12/introducing-google-public-dns-new-dns.html
Or the openDNS ones.
Nice article man, I tried the verizon servers and they way faster, telus always has dns problems.
I find it hard to believe that, for an average user, changing DNS servers will boost your internet speed 3 times. Maybe in your case it improved it a lot, but you must be an outlier. For the average person, it probably won’t make much of a humanly noticeable difference.
I’ve been with Telus for years and moved around between them, DynDNS, and now OpenDNS. It’s never really made that much of a difference at dslreports speedtest or now speedtest.net.
Where it does make a difference is in website development. It can take up to a week for Telus to update when you make a change at your domain registrar. But if you use OpenDNS or any other DNS, the change is minutes to a few hours.
I beg to differ, I saw drastic improvement immediately. I was having constant DNS problems, tech support got me no-where, Thanks for this article!! esp post #11!
I don’t know about speeds but I do know that over the weekend I tried to view changes to my site and couldn’t. Why? Because telus’s dns wasn’t finding it. How do I know? Well the two macs in my house couldn’t find it but my iPhone could using the 3G network. I put in opendns’s numbers and my site showed up.
I’d like to add their numbers to my router but I’m using a telus seimens router which won’t allow it. Instead I put the numbers in the network settings on each mac.
Checked out these Verizon DNS servers….fast
Google DNS servers are fast too…..
Thank you Benson!
Now I finally know why my Telus ultra-high speed internet connection works as fast as two tin cans attached by string.
Telus’ tech dept keeps trying to tell me the speed is what it should be, and that it must be my browser’s problem. However, so often I can’t even get a website to bring up photos or even get onto sites during peak usage hours, it made me think that Telus’ cache size was really more the issue – although I doubt they will ever admit it.
I’m thinking of changing providers.
I work for Telus as a sysadmin for a different department. I’ve recommended OpenDNS for years. I’ve also suggested to upper management that we should either get with it or just use OpenDNS to enhance our DSL customers’ experience. Slow DNS resolution is so 1990′s.
Thank you for posting this – I echoe the commenter above who was having major problems with telus ‘high speed turbo.’ Phoned them up and they tried to make me sound like I was imagining that it took me 30 seconds to a minute to load Gmail or the Globe and Mail. Tried OpenDNS and things now load instantly.
Great article Benson! I am on TELUS network too but in spite of my hard efforts I could not change the DNS settings in the Actiontec V1000H router/modem provided by Telus. It seems as they run a propietory firmware that disables the possibility of changing DNS servers. Any ideas on how I can work around their settings? Thanks for helping!
George
You can always set it on your desktop / laptop. I have my laptop’s DNS servers set to Google’s (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4) all the time. It doesn’t matter what network I’m on. This works 99% of the time. However, I was in the Apple store the other day and they filter DNS. So you have to use the DHCP settings sometimes.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25708456-Actiontec-V1000h-31.30L.48-modified-TELUS-firmware
This link will give you instructions and download link that will allow changes to be made…
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25708456-Actiontec-V1000h-31.30L.48-modified-TELUS-firmware
This link will give you instructions and download link that will allow changes to be made…