OpenDNS

Scott Hanselman has a great post about OpenDNS which goes beyond what I know about it. However, a couple weeks ago I began using it due to frustrating issues with my ISP, and I think it's a good alternative to know about.

I live in an area that technological time has largely ignored. I like it that way except for needing seriously fast internet access. For the first year and a half, I used (and will not put a hyperlink to) Direcway, or HughesNet as they are now called. A satellite ISP. It was better than dial-up, and that is all I can say about it without bashing it.

Last summer I found out some of my neighbors used a local wireless ISP, which has several towers around the northern Shenandoah valley and will install an antenna for you to connect to its 802.11b access points. I am thirteen miles away from the nearest tower, but since I am 500 feet above the Shenandoah valley floor, I have a line of site to it. They hooked it up and it worked. It worked really well. The speed varies between 1mbs and 11mbs. A lot of the issues with satellite went away, such as weird timeouts with MS Outlook Web Access and the unholy bandwidth throttling (aka "Fair Access Policy"). Good riddance, satellite!

All seemed good for a while, but then I started having occasional trouble connecting. My calls to their tech support would usually end up with them saying, "we can ping your antenna, why don't you power it off and back up." Often that fixed the problem, but not always. Usually after some time things would work again. But I was getting really peeved with the lack of reliability.

I noticed one day that when opening a new tab in Firefox and experiencing the connection problems, some of my other tabs would still connect to their respective URLs. That made me think that this must be a DNS problem on my ISP's end.

I stumbled across OpenDNS in a podcast I was listening to (something from ITConversations, can't remember which podcast right now though). I modified my router's DNS configuration to use OpenDNS's servers instead of my ISP's. That was almost a month ago and my "connectivity" problems have not occurred since. So +1 for OpenDNS, and thanks to Scott for a lot more helpful info about it.