[Vision2020] Frontier (was Verizon) DSL

[Paul Rumelhart]

The rest of the problems are probably related to network congestion, but 
the problem with web pages taking longer to be found is probably because 
their DNS servers are overloaded.  DNS servers are basically a directory 
that converts a human-readable domain name (like yahoo.com or whatever) 
into it's actual IP address (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx).  I've found that Time 
Warner's DNS servers are often overloaded.  You might try specifying one 
of the free DNS servers in your network settings rather than your ISP 
DNS servers.  Google has a couple that can be used.  I think they are 
8.8.8.8 and 4.4.4.4, but I could be remembering wrong.  You can also add 
certain entries to your hosts file on your system.  I'm not sure where 
that is on Windows, but it's usually in /etc/hosts on linux or Unix.  If 
you have a site that takes a long time to be found, then if you can find 
it's address you can add it to your hosts file to make it faster 
loading.  On linux, you do an nslookup on the domain name.  I don't know 
what you do on Windows.  The only downside to that is if they change the 
address of the server behind the human-readable name you won't be able 
to connect until you update or remove that entry from your hosts file.

Paul

Saundra Lund wrote:
> I couldn't think of a better place than here to ask . . . 
>
> For those of you with Frontier/Verizon DSL "high speed" Internet, have any
> of you noticed things being slower?
>
> I don't know the technical details of my question so I'm not sure where the
> problem lies (any explanation would be appreciated), but I've been noticing
> that Web pages are taking longer to be "found" after I click on hyperlinks
> I've been using -- I've checked, and the links are still correct.  Streaming
> video often doesn't seems as smooth as it used to be, downloading songs from
> Amazon & iTunes seems to be a bit slower, and uploading seems to have slowed
> to a crawl.  At first, I thought it was just me/my computer, but I was
> ranting to myself the other night, and my dh mentioned that he'd noticed it,
> too.  I checked my laptop & I'm seeing the same thing there.
>
> I'm getting various results on speed & ping tests, not that I know what
> those mean, but they are tests that I've run fairly regularly (every month
> or two), and I've never seen results -- especially ping & upload -- scores
> as poor as I seem to regularly be seeing recently.
>
> Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.
>
>
> Saundra
>
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