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.

In the case of Google and other big CDNs, there can be dozens of these local caches all around the world, and using a local cache can improve latency and throughput by a huge margin. If you have a 10 or 20Mbps connection, and yet a download is crawling along at just a few hundred kilobytes, this is generally because you are downloading from an international source (downloading software or drivers from a Taiwanese site is a good example). Using a local cache reduces the strain on international connections, but it also makes better use of national networks which are both lower-latency and higher-capacity.

In short, this change will make sure that UK netizens and other European surfers download data from nearby, rather than traversing the pond, resulting in a sizable speed-up. Asian surfers (or any English-language surfers that are geographically distant from the US) could also experience a big speed-up. Today’s change probably won’t have a huge affect on US web users, but it will vary on a per-user and per-city basis.

The only downer is that this new feature won’t affect everything on the web — at least not yet. For now you will only experience a speed-up if you’re using DNS servers belonging to Google or OpenDNS, and if you’re accessing a website or service powered by one of the participating CDNs: Google, EdgeCast, CDNetworks, Comodo, or CloudFlare. Perplexingly, there’s no real way of finding out which CDN your favorite websites uses — but merely the fact that Google is part of the initiative means that Gmail, YouTube, Docs, Picasa, and so on, should feel quite a lot faster today; for some users, anyway.

Looking forward, the next step is surely to get the giant CDNs on board — Akamai, Limelight, and Amazon — but considering Google’s infatuation with speed, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the introductions of more initiatives, now that it has a group of CDNs in tow.

Finally, if you want to get in on the faster interwebs action, both Google Public DNS and OpenDNS are free to use! Just whack the IP addresses of Google’s DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) into your router or network interface, or register with OpenDNS, and you’ll instantly begin reaping the gains of the Global Internet Speedup.

Read more about the Global Internet Speedup or what will happen when everyone has a 100Mbps connection

[Image credit: Chrys Omori]