A safer and faster Internet with OpenDNS

By Daniel Wood

You boot up your computer, sit back and wait for it to load your operating system, launch your Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) dialler and when you’re connected to the Internet, launch your browser. And then you realise that your pages are taking forever to load. Yet again.

It’s a common problem for most home users – and is the Number One complaint that ISPs receive from consumers. There are only a handful of ISPs in Malaysia, and all of them suffer from this problem. While speed can be affected by hardware (and in many cases where the user is using a wireless connection, the signal strength), the problem can generally be helped (or solved) simply by using an alternative DNS resolution service.

To briefly explain, the Domain Name System (DNS) is a naming system assigned to computers, servers, or any resource connected to the Internet. When a user keys in a web address (that is meaningful only to humans), the web browser sends this information to the DNS server, which translates the domain into binary identifiers ( or Internet Protocol/IP addresses that is meaningful to computers) to locate and identify the computer or server you need to access. A favourite analogy is that DNS is the Yellow Pages or the Directory of the Internet.

In the case of ISPs, each ISP maintains their own DNS server or servers, and because of the large amount of simultaneous users logged into the ISP and accessing the DNS servers, they tend to become over crowded and poorly maintained, especially during peak hours. Most servers are built to handle hundreds or thousands of requests at any one time, but the reality is that a single user can have many requests in one minute (especially with the increased use of tabbed browsing, users in fact send multiple requests all of the time). The end result is that the DNS servers take longer to look up the proper Internet Protocol (IP) address for the domains that people enter. And because this delay is associated at the beginning of the process, bandwidth does not affect the speed, so it usually doesn’t matter to the user if they are on higher or lower bandwidth speeds, as DNS problems will affect all users of a certain ISP.

Malaysian ISPs have been facing this problem more and more recently as their DNS servers are getting overloaded, and even backup servers are not able to handle requests. Users will get the error message “Cannot find server or DNS Error” on their browsers, and this can get very frustrating for people.

An alternative and free DNS resolution service is fast becoming popular on the back of all these problems. OpenDNS is an organisation that offers DNS resolution for use by anyone with an Internet connection. Their strategy is quite simple: they place servers in strategic locations and maintain a growing cache of most commonly accessed domain names, allowing their servers to process queries much faster and therefore vastly improving page retrieval speeds.

Many Malaysian users have reported improved retrieval speeds, and are loyal users of the service, despite its unique problems such as redirection when handling failed requests, more exposure to phishing attempts, and more recently, users were infected with a virus when accessing their contact servers. However, paid upgrades to better software does solve a lot of these problems.

Another negative aspect of OpenDNS is that it allows users to bypass ISP censorship. All Malaysian ISPs maintain some form of “blacklisted sites” – users who enter sites associated with pornography, gambling or sedition will get their requests blocked by the ISP, thereby denying them access to these websites. OpenDNS’s servers maintain no such lists, allowing users unrestricted access to all such sites. The ease of use of OpenDNS and its effectiveness is apparent: many local pornography sites have now actually posted a tutorial on OpenDNS on their frontpage, to show people how to access their sites. Tutorials and Guides on OpenDNS and its more advanced functions are freely available on online groups, community boards and social media sites.

In short, as Internet usage in Malaysia grows, local ISPs must also learn to grow and adapt to the demands of their users. Quicker DNS servers, or DNS services that adopt some of the mechanisms from OpenDNS, are surely needed if ISPs are to be taken more seriously by an increasingly aware and adept Internet community. Left to their own devices, Malaysians will seek for solutions, and inevitably find them, at the expense of the ISPs.