[jcnnghm]

People like this shouldn't be writing technical articles.

A 700ms ping would be indicative of severe network problems, especially at that distance. The author is probably experiencing packet loss. Realistic ping times across the country are usually 100ms or so. I can ping most major websites in under 20ms.

DNS can indeed be a bottleneck, but it usually isn't. It's a fairly basic service, and if it's really a problem it's simple stupid to switch to a free provider like google.

Streaming video is not dependent on latency, only throughput.

Dark fiber won't necessarily help. The bottleneck is more realistically in the switching equipment. A single fiber can carry massive amounts of data.

[donaq]

Not only that. It's really stupid to use IP addresses instead of domain names because, guess what, most sites share IPs these days.