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."

Comments

Re:Akami?

[Binary Boy]

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

Re:Ehh.... this is ok, but ....

[slamb]

Isn't this little more than an expensive band-aid for the underlying bandwidth problem?

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).

To save two TCP setups and teardowns

[tepples]

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.