Google is working with Open DNS and five other firms on an initiative aimed to speed up the internet. The Global Internet Speedup is a collaborative effort aimed to make online tools and web pages run faster, achieved through cooperation between recursive domain name server (DNS) services and content delivery networks (CDNs).

The collaboration is being done through an open internet engineering task force (IETF) proposed standard called “edns-client-subnet”, which helps better direct content to users, thereby decreasing latency and congestion while increasing transfer speeds and helping the internet to scale faster and further.

DNS acts like the phone book for the internet, converting human readable domains, such as www.opendns.com, to IP addresses, such as 208.69.38.160, which PCs and devices can connect to.

“But what happens when you look up a business in the phone book and there are 50 locations? You probably want the location closest to you,” the firms explained on The Global Internet Speedup website.

“When trying to reach a website that exists in 50 locations around the world, you would want the same thing to happen. You want to be sent to the closest, fastest or least congested location automatically. Figuring out which location is closest is not possible with DNS alone.”

The group went on to explain that by using OpenDNS or Google Public DNS and visiting a website or using a service provided by one of the participating networks or CDNs, a truncated version of your IP address will be added into the DNS request.

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“The internet service or CDN will use this truncated IP address to make a more informed decision regarding how it responds so that you can be connected to the most optimal server. With this more intelligent routing, customers will have a better internet experience with lower latency and faster speeds. Best of all, this integration is being done using an open standard that is available for any company to integrate into their own platform.”

The five other firms working with Google are: EdgeCast Networks, CDNetworks, BitGravity, Comodo and CloudFlare.