The Global Internet Speedup is a new initiative that just surfaced with one goal in mind: to make load times faster for web users around the world. The concept is pretty simple, and companies such as Google, Bitgravity, CDNetworks, DNS.com, and Edgecast have already signed up.

Here’s what the project is tackling:

“DNS is like the phone book for the Internet. It converts human readable domains (www.opendns.com) to an IP address (208.69.38.160) that your computer can connect to. But what happens when you look up a business in the phone book and there are 50 locations? You probably want the location closest to you.”

These days most content delivery networks or CDNs deliver content based on the user’s DNS server, which can often be a long distance from the actual end point you’re accessing. This means that in a lot of cases you’ll be downloading a webpage from a datacenter located thousands of miles away, which results in significantly reduced download speeds caused by the latency and overall stress on the connection.

What the Global Internet Speedup does to accelerate this whole process is add the first octets of the user’s IP address to the DSN request.  The CDN can identify the user’s country or even city based on these octets, and route the connection to the closest server.

The catch is that the initiative is still in its diapers, and only a limited amount of users, those who are using the free OpenDNS or Google Public DNS, will see load times speeding up when visiting certain websites. The Global Internet Speedup website states that a “number of leading Internet companies” will be implementing this technique in the coming year, so the number of supporting sites will likely grow by a sizable percentage in the near future.