Does anyone suspect Verizon does maintenance on all its DNS servers at the same time?

[struggle4progress]

Various browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari) running under Leopard seem to stall browsing predictably in the wee hours of the AM. This happens during the day, too, but I can usually recover by changing to another public DNS server. But around 3AM EST, I typically can't get any page loading, despite trying other DNS servers

I know earlier versions of Safari-Leopard inadvertently screwed up on the DNS request side, but the latest updates are supposed to fix that. So currently I'm wondering whether the network (rather than home) side is the problem

[ChromeFoundry]

1. I usually...

hardcode the DNS addresses at the Router. The primary DNS is set to AT&T's address and the second is usually an OpenDNS server address. My Router is setup to perform DNS Relay. So my clients all have 192.168.1.1 (router address) as the DNS Server address.

Hope that makes sense. Not sure if that configuration would cure your problem.

[struggle4progress]

2. I'm not running a server: I'm just browsing. My OS is mac's leopard: the

original release had a known DNS problem -- namely, it requested an SRV record from the DNS server several times before trying A record requests. So pages with multiple links tended to time out before loading, if the DNS server used didn't recognize SRV requests. This was allegedly fixed in a later leopard release. A number of people got better performance by switching to (say) openDNS. So I started playing around with various allegedly public DNS servers and got better performance from some, other than those automatically loaded by my ISP. Often I get dramatic improvements. But at certain times of day, credibly low traffic times (at least in the US), use of some of these other servers can still be problematic -- hence the question