Ok Folks, over a month ago I was finally able to get wired cable internet in my new house thanks to Claro Nicaragua. I grabbed a Triple play: Digital Cable, Land Line and Cable Internet. I was really hesitant and went back and forth with the sales folks as due to my own experience and friends, the cable infrastructure which was inherited from the Cablenet times before Claro Nicaragua bought them and rebrand it as Turbonett along with its Wireless and ADSL internet service.
One of the biggest objections I have is the DNS, oh my God the DNS!
The first two weeks I had a major pain using them, so I went to the RCA router to change the DNS, and surprisingly enough, on the model I have you can’t change them. So I had to change them locally on my computer, as my first choice I have used Google Public DNS, but odd enough it seems Claro Nicaragua blocks the traffic from them from time to time. Which was causing me serious issues as I depend on a stable connection to do my job.
I then decided to do more research and I found NameBench, which is a utility to benchmark the nameservers speed based on your own internet connection thru several tests. At the end you get a report of the ones that work faster for you. Funny enough nor Claro’s own DNS were listed, even Guatemala’s Claro were listed to be faster as well as NTT’s DNS (ISP from Japan). So I with the report in hand, I went in to setup 5 different nameservers on my computer so we can test this.
After changing the DNS, my experience changed… completely. I am now a happy camper!
If you are a Claro internet user and do not want to go over the NameBench experiment, then simply use OpenDNS Name servers which are: 208.67.222.222 & 208.67.220.220.
And if you need further assistance, drop me a note!