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Google and OpenDNS Work On Global Internet Speedup
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."
Speaking of squid, its 2011, is squid ever gonna support ipv6? There's not much software out there that doesn't support v6, and squid is probably the most famous.
http://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/IPv6
None of the above. It's a scheme to pass your IP address to CDNs such as akamai so that they can select an edge server that's closer to you. Absent this, CDNs select an edge server closest to your DNS provider — that's fine if you're using your ISP's DNS, but in the case of an OpenDNS or Google Public DNS, that's likely a poor choice.
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.)
Keep in mind that Google, Amazon, Akamai, etc. had already created geographically distributed networks to reduce latency and bandwidth. Improving the accuracy of geolocated DNS responses through a protocol extension is basically free and makes these techniques even more effective.
Also, Google cares a lot about latency. A major component of that is backbone transit latency, and once you have enough bandwidth to avoid excessive queueing delay or packet loss, I can imagine only four ways to significantly it: invent faster-than-light communications, find a material with a lower refractive index than the optical fibers in use today, wait for fewer round trips, or reduce the distance travelled per trip. This helps with the last. Building more fiber wouldn't help with any of those and would also be a lot more expensive.
Full disclosure: I work for Google (but not on this).
You aren't understanding what is going on here. All Google and OpenDNS are doing is providing the authoritative DNS server with the IP address of the client. Google/OpenDNS know nothing about any possible caching or local servers. They are just making it possible for the final DNS server to possibly, assuming that whoever owns the domain you are resolving supports some kind of CDN, send you to a nearby server.
What likely really happened here is this:
Akami: Hey Google! You're compulsion to violate everyone's privacy is fucking up the Internet by breaking all of the CDN/Geo-based services.
Google: But... but... we must know everything about everyone otherwise we'll not be able to sell them to our customers.
Akami: Whatever dude, you're causing 50% congestion on the backbone links because your shit hides the actual address of the client.
Google: Well, we've got sack-fulls of PhDs. We'll find a solution that allows us to keep spying and selling and still allows the CDNs to work.
Akami: Look you jackasses, the system that exists today works. Your crap is just causing problems and labor for everyone else.
Google: Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na I can't hear you.
Akami: Seriously. You're being a dick.
Google: No. We've just invented this awesome thing that is going to Speed-Up! The InterNets!
Akami: Jesus Christ! The system that was there before you broke it works. Why the fuck do you have to keep breaking shit?
Google: Because we can and people are stupid. And we are rich. So STFU.
Akami: Fuck. There's no reasoning with these clowns.
Even if your first connection is to a server in Djibouti, you may be redirected
Which costs a TCP setup and teardown to Djibouti.
to a server in Canada, and then that one may again redirect you to a server in Sweden
Which costs a TCP setup and teardown to Canada.
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.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC