Mediacom DNS IP addresses (and why you should use OpenDNS instead)

I couldn’t find Mediacom’s DNS IP addresses anywhere online and their tech support wouldn’t tell me, so here they are (for the Quad Cities Iowa/Illinois area):

97.64.183.164 (Springfield, MO)
97.64.209.37 (Valdosta, GA)

Benchmarking these against OpenDNS and other free DNS options using Namebench or DNS Benchmark reveals Mediacom’s servers to be 52.1% slower. This isn’t surprising since both the above locations are much farther away than OpenDNS’ Chicago servers.

OpenDNS destroys the competition.

Combined with Mediacom not implementing DNSSEC while OpenDNS has implemented DNSCurve, as well as OpenDNS’ better feature set, it’s a good idea to use OpenDNS instead.