I regularly have customers tell me that “their internet is slow” despite having such and such speed tier with their ISP. While there can be many causes for slow page loads including, viruses, spyware, network congestion and ISP network issues to just name a few, often the culprit can be narrowed down to just three letters: Domain Name Servers (DNS).

DNS servers are often overlooked when troubleshooting page load issues. However, they serve a very important role in loading every page by translating the page address like www.wrightpcconsulting.com into the numerical Internet Protocol (IP) address [72.29.79.198] that your device uses to find and load the page. With today’s highly graphical web page content, sometimes hundreds of address must be looked up to load a page. So, when your DNS server is slow, non responsive or returns errors, page load speeds can be directly affected.

Most customers simply rely on their service provider to assign an appropriate set DNS servers to their device(s). While that often works well, ISP DNS servers are notoriously slow. In order to help my customers determine the best DNS servers for them, I recomend that they use a benchmarking tool like Namebench. Namebench will test your current DNS servers against other open DNS servers and makes a recommendation based on the results.

If after trying Namebench you need help setting up the recommended DNS servers in you computer or router, feel free to submit a ticket.

Here are a few screen shots of the benchmark tests run my Namebench:

Click to Enlarge Thumbnails

For the second time just weeks, Blackberry’s across North America are falling silent as the data stops flowing.

Once again, the ‘Net is abuzz with reports of an outage of Blackberry Internet Services (BIS), the consumer data gatekeeper for Blackberry users. So far, it seems that the outage is affecting all data services except for e-mail. That includes PIN messages, web browsing, Blackberry Messenger and any other application that requires data services (eg. twitter, weather updates, etc.).

This is the second data outage in a month for the Blackberry.  The last time it was e-mail services that went down.  That outage lasted for more than a day for many customers in the US and Canada as well as many other parts of the world.  That outage was blamed on a server glitch during maintenance.

What will the cause be this time, server gremlins?

Update 1:  According to those in the Crackberry Forums email is now down too.

Update 2:  Crackberry.com is now reporting that the fix may take up to one day to be implemented!

Update 3:  Looks like the Blackberry messenger did it:

“RIM Statement – December 23rd

A service interruption occurred Tuesday that affected BlackBerry customers in the Americas. Message delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption. Phone service and SMS services on BlackBerry smartphones were unaffected. Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure. RIM has taken corrective action to restore service.

RIM has also provided a new version of BlackBerry Messenger (version 5.0.0.57) and is encouraging anyone who downloaded or upgraded BlackBerry Messenger since December 14th to upgrade to this latest version which resolves the issue. RIM continues to monitor its systems to maintain normal service levels and apologizes for any inconvenience to customers.“

Having the power of Google and “the cloud” on your dash or the palm of your hand when traveling to provide turn-by-turn guidance is coming to an Android smartphone near you! Recently Google announced the reality of such convenience on their blog.

So, you too really can “get their from here.”

According to Wired.com’s recent speed test challenge, the carrier with “the most bars” is not the carrier with the most speed.  In fact, results pegged AT&T Wireless‘ 3G network speed  as the slowest while Verizon Wireless‘ testers found them to have the fastest 3g data transfers.

See the test method here and the results here.

This week Automattic released a beta version of it’s mobile app for BlackBerry mobile phones.  I’ve downloaded and am trying this new app on my Curve 8330.  So far, so good.

Take a quick tour: