From what I can tell, almost all cable internet providers have horrible DNS issues. This lead me to search for a way to set my DNS provider to someone else last night, since it was down yet again (thanks charter). I was able to get to google, so I searched and found Google Public DNS.

It's not to bad, set your primary and secondary DNS entries to the 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 addresses and voila faster DNS lookups. I wouldn't recommend it behind corporate firewalls, etc... but for home use that beats dealing with DNS going down from your ISP. Google gets infrastructure right at least.