Does your web feel faster today? Thank the Global Internet Speedup

Starting today, a simple but effective switch has been flipped on DNS servers across the world that should significantly decrease your page load times and increase your download speeds across the web. This change is one of the first steps of the Global Internet Speedup, an initiative spearheaded by the likes of OpenDNS, Google, and content delivery networks with the goal of — you guessed it — speeding up the web.

At the moment CDNs deliver content based on the location of your DNS server, which more often than not is geographically distant from your actual computer. The speed-up is beautifully elegant in its implementation: Basically, when your browser makes a DNS request, the DNS server will now forward the first three octets (123.45.67) of your IP address to the target web service. The first three octets provide more than enough data to divine the country you are surfing from, and sometimes even your city. The web service then uses your geolocation data to make sure that the resource you’ve requested — a website, a YouTube video, a file download — is delivered by a local cache.

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