How I sped up my slow U-verse connection.
Web surfing with U-Verse was getting annoying. I was regularly getting pages that would mostly load, but were delayed from 5 to 20 or more seconds in rendering because some elements failed to load. Noticing that the worst pages were ones with large numbers of DNS names to resolve I swapped my U-Verse supplied DNS server for OpenDNS and things became much faster. (I since swapped that to my own local bind9 because OpenDNS kept hijacking my web sites, this is also fast.)
You can see on my “time to ping google” network check exactly where I
changed DNS away from AT&T’s servers.
Odd points to ponder: the DNS for www.google.com has a 5 minute life, short enough to expire between tests, but you’d think have it in cache from other client use once in a while. There is an odd quantitization in the earlier data for which I have no explanation. The other ping test running at the same time, by IP directly, does not show this effect and does not show a change at the DNS change.
******Moral:** Don’t trust your ISP for anything but packets in and out, and suspect they will screw that up too.
Note: This may or may not affect your U-Verse. I suspect they have many DNS servers and perhaps they aren’t all lame, or perhaps they have a throttling policy or something and they are all lame. Only you will know.