How to setup Tomato with Unlocator DNS for Roku? (speed not stable)

Question

Tried to find a solution for this but couldn't - would appreciate your help. My setup is as following: My MAIN ISP ROUTER (Dual Band D-Link on 10.0.0.X) is serving wireless clients around the house, and also connected via ethernet to a Linksys e300 SECOND ROUTER (on 192.168.1.X) that is connected via ethernet to my Roku (and also has wireless turned on).

I used to use a VPN but now I just want to use a DNS service like Unlocator or Unblock-US to bypass restrictions (Hulu, Netflix) on my Roku device. The Tomato router is currently set up as: DHCP, Access Point and has the DNS settings of Unlocator set in the "Basic-> Network" page. I also have the "Use internal DNS" and "Intercept DNS port" checked under DNS settings, and "Use received DNS with user-entered DNS" unchecked - as mentioned in the DNS Provider web page.

THE PROBLEM IS I have a 40mbps connection which i am able to get on my main router, but when i'm connected to my Tomato network - I get unstable speeds, and sometimes also choppy playback on Roku.

Could this be related to the above settings? should I set the tomato router as something other than "Access Point"?

This is so frustrating - would really appreciate your help! Thanks in advance, Roy

Answer 1

Many CDNs look at which DNS server IP address your lookup came from, and use that to point your client at the nearest CDN node (edge server) to get your video stream from.

By playing DNS tricks like Unlocator to make it look like your Roku box is in a different country than it really is, you're telling the CDN to serve you content from servers that are much farther away, across links with higher latency and likely lower throughput.

It's even worse if you use VPN services like Unblock-US, because VPN adds more overhead.