I’m using PLDT’s HomeBro Ultera basic plan and that’s 3 megabits per second. That is fast enough for most of us. However, this last 2 or 3 months, I’m experiencing very poor browsing experience. Sites are loading show, but once started, it loads very fast. It turns out to be not PLDT’s fault.
After the installation of our internet connection, the very first thing I did was configure the router and the network connection settings to use Google’s name servers, like: 8.8.8.8. That was a year or so ago. It doesn’t have problem until this recent months where hostname resolution is very slow.
Symptoms
When you test your speed using SpeedTest.net, it shows you a fast connection and it is consistent by the way. But when you start browsing sites, the experience is very poor, like you are staging at a while page for a very long time then suddenly contents get loaded very fast, then stops, then loads another content.
Since the issue is the hostname resolution, for a website using multiple contents from multiple domains, the issue is very noticeable.
Replace your name servers
After some research and some trial and errors, I have found out that the issue is on Google’s name servers. I tried to switch to OpenDNS name servers.
You can get the IP addresses here: https://www.opendns.com/home-internet-security/opendns-ip-addresses/.
I have replaced all instances of name servers from my linux machine’s /etc/resolve.conf to Windows network connection settings and to our router settings. So far, everything is okay now.
Conclusion
It could not be Google’s fault or maybe we don’t know. As far as I know, my ip address is blacklisted because it says it spams or something (probably a shared IP with other compromised customers) and maybe Google blocks me or something. Or it could be that there are problems with Google’s DNS service.
Therefore, I switched to OpenDNS and will continue to monitor if things will slow down again. If that happens, I’ll switch DNS servers once again.