Thread: General Virgin Media DNS
View Single Post
Old 30-04-2019, 18:56   #25
Kushan
FORMER Virgin Media Staff
 
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: Warrington
Posts: 4,737
Kushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appeal
Kushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appealKushan has a bronzed appeal
Re: Virgin Media DNS

Quote:
Originally Posted by General Maximus View Post
And you think VM are a participant? I don't think so. The whole point of them having a CDN is to benefit them in terms of cost or potentially provide a richer experience for their customer base. They aren't interested in serving non-paying non-VM customers.

I think you have misunderstood how the technology works.
Sorry Max, I think it's you that's misunderstood this tech.

The way CDN's work is by having the content you need as close to you as possible. This means having data centres all around the world. This also means placing servers inside a network if you can, for best results. When we say "Virgin's CDN servers", we don't mean servers owned by Virgin, we mean servers owned by the respective CDN provider (A top-tier like Akamai or Cloudflare, or directly from the likes of Netflix and Google/Youtube) that have peered inside Virgin's network (And others).

It's win/win for everyone here - the CDN providers provide a better service (Which means you, the consumer, get a better service - something you'll care about when visiting sites such as youtube) and the ISP requires less egress (Bandwidth outside of their network).


The problem is, how do you know which of those data centres is (geographically) close to you? How do you know if your ISP has a cache inside its network? That's where DNS comes into it and typically, your ISP's DNS will point you to their own peered CDN if they can.

A few years ago, the likes of Google DNS had no way of really knowing where, geographically, you were. This means that when you use those DNS servers instead of Virgin's, you might get routed to a CDN cache that's actually much further away - which means more latency, which also means more bandwidth outside your local node (Which means potential for hitting more congestion). The article above specifically details with how they "fix" this problem so that even if you're using a 3rd party DNS server, you've got a better chance of getting the "right" CDN cache.

It has nothing to do with Virgin offering out their own caches to 3rd parties or anything like that. That's not even possible.
Kushan is offline   Reply With Quote