After a recent relocation, I re-signed up for Comcast and was pleasantly surprised to find my broadband speeds have increased!  Whether this is a new HSI product, or a function of my new location, I’m not sure, but I now seem to be sporting about 23 megabits down and 2.5 megabits up, which equates to over 2 megabytes per second streaming!  (Yeah, hella fast—for America anyway!)

The last couple of days, the service has been rather slow… but not in download speed.  When going to a webpage, the initial lookup took 2-6 seconds!  6 seconds is a long time to wait for your webpage to start loading!  In doing some tests, initially with nslookup and dig, and by timing requests to Comcast’s DNS servers, it was clear that the problem was Comcast’s DNS  servers.  Many packets were being dropped, but only to their DNS servers.  Since the queries are UDP packets, there is no “guarantee” that they will make it to their destination, so ostensibly much of the delay was in client-side time-outs and re-querying.

While some forums suggested OpenDNS as a solution, I went about using Level3′s DNS servers (pick two from 4.2.2.1 through 4.2.2.6) simply by entering the IP addresses into my router config.  Big improvement—pages now pop right up without delay!

This comes two days after being surprised by Comcast’s DNS hijacking redirection, which sends users to a page full of adverts, rather than returning an error, should they mistype a URL.  This [dis]service, dubbed “DNS Helper” by their marketing department, requires its users to opt-out, which I was able to do.  Sign into Comcast’s Customer Central and you should find the option in there, somewhere.  Or better yet, use someone else’s DNS, which is perhaps their master plan for scaling DNS.

So what is going on with Comcast?  Googling the problem reveals a history of complaints, so clearly their new redirection “service” isn’t to be blamed.  Slow DNS queries are a bottleneck for web surfing, yet don’t show up on “speed tests,” which may be why Comcast is happily ignoring this problem.

For now, I’ll just enjoy the fast connection without Comcast’s DNS until the billing department starts f—ing with me in about 12 months when my “deal” runs out!