Google DNS - 8.8.8.8

Recently at home I've been having weird international speed issues, but only to certain locations.  Vimeo was unusably slow, the App store was barely usable.  My ISP (Internode, go buy from them) reported no issues.  Swapped routers, no change.. Speedtests and line sync were fine, some downloads great, others crawled.  

I finally nailed it down today - in a stroke of laziness I'd set 8.8.8.8 for the DHCP pool's DNS server.  Turns out, 8.8.8.8 doesn't seem to exist in Australia anymore.  I swear this used to be in Sydney, it was around 60ms away.  Now, from my home, every box I've got around Au and every Traceroute site I can find, it's showing up in California.

or-10mf.bne#traceroute 8.8.8.8

Type escape sequence to abort.

Tracing the route to 8.8.8.8

  1 150.101.180.24 28 msec 28 msec 28 msec

  2 150.101.180.50 24 msec 28 msec 28 msec

  3 203.16.212.13 44 msec 44 msec 44 msec

  4 72.14.223.1 48 msec 44 msec 44 msec

  5 66.249.95.226 44 msec 44 msec

    66.249.95.224 44 msec

  6 209.85.249.52 148 msec 144 msec

    66.249.95.166 196 msec

  7 209.85.255.34 160 msec 148 msec 144 msec

  8 209.85.255.39 180 msec

    209.85.255.217 176 msec 176 msec

  9 209.85.250.101 176 msec 176 msec 180 msec

 10 209.85.241.154 176 msec

    209.85.241.162 184 msec

    209.85.241.154 192 msec

 11 8.8.8.8 176 msec 176 msec 176 msec

A geolocation of the last hop before it finds its target: http://www.ip2location.com/209.85.241.154 - definitely in the US.  So Google's anycast DNS from the US is returning US-local mirror addresses for things instead of using Au CDNs.  And it's causing weird, per-destination slowness.  So that's the reason my 'net has been sporadically terrible this month.

Lesson: Use 8.8.8.8 for testing purposes only.  Set your DNS to your own or your ISP's own DNS servers otherwise.