3rd party DNS ?

[#1]

are Level 3 still the preferred option for 3rd party DNS servers?
have used OpenDNS in the past but they didn't handle routing to closest akamai CDN servers very well (they openly admitted it too that they probably weren't the choice if you used them).

[#2]

There's only google dns which I would avoid for CDN content, those servers appear to be based in France.
AFAIK Opendns and Level 3 servers are all based in London.

[#3]

OpenDNS is US based I believe?
OpenDNS openly stated on their websites that if you used CDN's a lot then their service would probably result in poor performance as it would always route you to the US.
Not sure if it's changed since though.

[#4]

The Opendns company is based in the US but they have dns servers all over the world. Here in the UK we are router to the London based servers, except on the rare occasion when some thing goes wrong.
You can prove this with a tracert:

Tracing route to resolver2.opendns.com [208.67.220.220]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
  1    52 ms    99 ms    99 ms  dsldevice.lan [192.168.1.254]
  2    37 ms    32 ms    61 ms  lo0-central10.ptn-ag04.plus.net [195.166.128.193]
  3    26 ms    26 ms    25 ms  link-b-central10.ptn-gw02.plus.net [212.159.2.142]
  4    28 ms    26 ms    24 ms  xe-8-2-0.ptw-cr02.plus.net [212.159.0.118]
  5    25 ms    25 ms    25 ms  ae2.ptw-cr01.plus.net [195.166.129.4]
  6    26 ms    24 ms    25 ms  te-3-4.car5.London1.Level3.net [217.163.45.181]
  7    25 ms    25 ms    25 ms  ae-1-51.edge6.London1.Level3.net [4.69.139.76]
  8    26 ms    26 ms    25 ms  OPEN-DNS-IN.edge6.London1.Level3.net [195.50.116.54]
  9    26 ms    25 ms    25 ms  resolver2.opendns.com [208.67.220.220]
or the following command in a dos prompt:
nslookup -type=txt which.opendns.com. 208.67.220.220

[#5]

i guess they've changed their service since i last used them, as at that time everything went via the US and they advised you to not use their service if you used services that relied on CDNs