Once upon a time, the route to the BBC (for iPlayer etc) used to depend on whose DNS you were using (different ISPs saw different addresses, as a means of load balancing). Does that still apply, e.g. what does nslookup return for www.bbc.co.uk. See below.

And if it does still depend on whose DNS you are using, does it make much difference to anything?

For surfing performance, you can get an objective view of whether it makes any noticeable difference to browsing performance from the surfspeed tests at www.numion.com which set off a string of customisable pseudo-browsing tests and tell you how long it took.

Choice of DNS shouldn't make any difference in principle to bulk data transfer that looks up an address once and then just gets on with it. But if the destination address changes depending on whose DNS you are using, the speed may change too.

On Plusnet, with the router hiding the Plusnet-supplied DNS:

nslookup www.bbc.co.uk
Server: home.gateway
Address: 192.168.0.1

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www.bbc.net.uk
Address: 212.58.244.67
Aliases: www.bbc.co.uk

In most circumstances you won't have problems with using the router - but sometimes there can be issues if a router's implementation of DNS isn't particularly good. if you have issues then specify the DNS servers to see if it resolves the problem.

ta,
Phil.

DNSBench ( http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm ) is a good way to compare the fastest DNS servers for you. When I was on BE, openDNS was one of the fastest, but from BT it is often well down the list. That said, the difference between the top few is pretty much academic.

DNSBench will also give an indication of whether servers intercept some names. There are various reasons good and bad why they may do this, and whether such interception is appropriate for your needs.

In reply to a post by StephenTodd:

DNSBench ( http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm ) is a good way to compare the fastest DNS servers for you. When I was on BE, openDNS was one of the fastest, but from BT it is often well down the list.

Doesn't seem to be a Mac utility.