Comcast DNS Broken
I've been getting a few complaints about various sites not being accessible by Comcast users and discovered that quite a lot of domains are inexplicably not resolved by their DNS servers. Here is an extremely partial list, generated purely at random:
These are all popular blogs, and none of them work on Comcast's DNS. So I switched to OpenDNS, a free public dns service. You can sign up for an account, which gives you access to some features like porn-filtering and statistics on DNS usage. You don't have to have an account, however, you can just go ahead and start using the servers: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.
So how can OpenDNS do a better job than your ISP? It's no surprise, really - ISPs like Comcast differentiate themselves from each other by:
- Price.
- Download Rate, which is the easiest component of perceived Internet speed to understand and can be easily measured even by average users at various "how fast is your connection" websites.
- Inflaming fears of poorly-understood security threats, then promising to protect users from teh haXors with a raft of software, most of which is free anyway or is no better than free alternatives.
- The strength of their respective web portals, which is so pathetic a strategy it deserves no further comment.
I've never seen an ISP advertise superior DNS servers - DNS reliability just doesn't sell anybody on the service. But OpenDNS, on the other hand, does nothing but DNS, so they are motivated to do it right.
By the way - some might look at the above list of non-resolved domains and notice that the contents of these sites are all of a conservative or libertarian bent, and begin to imagine that Comcast has some kind of spooky Agenda here. So let me quash that right now: please don't get political. I seriously doubt that Comcast is seeking to block your access to sites of any particular persuasion, and I suspect we could turn up plenty of examples on every side of politics that fail in the same way - the list above is just a couple of sites I'm aware of right now that don't work. Before slinging that word "conspiracy" around, take a deep breath and try to remember: Incompetence is almost always a better explanation than Malice.