Has anyone queried it with Quad9 as to why things are slower?
Actually I did. Here's their Answer:
The primary reason that Quad9 is lower on DNS performance charts, like
dnsperf.com, is because we depend on peering at internet exchanges to route end users to the closest-possible location. Many of our locations do not have "transit". You can think of transit as telling the whole internet that Quad9 is at a certain location; while peering at internet exchanges is telling only the local networks that Quad9 is at that location. As a result, if an ISP is not available at a local internet exchanges, or refuses to peer with us, the users on that network will be routed to the closest-possible location with transit, which is not always so close.
As Quad9 is a nonprofit that depends solely on donations and sponsors, transit is unfortunately the most-difficult resource to receive from a sponsor, as it's typically more expensive than data center space, power, and hardware.
We're constantly trying to increase our peering arrangements so we can get as much local traffic to the local locations as possible. At this very moment, we're conducting a peering audit so we can enable dozens more peers at internet exchanges around the world.
