Is there any speed benefit to using a .com.au domain rather than a .com if your customers, hosting and DNS services are in Australia, specifically in the worst typical case (domain is not cached in any local DNS relay for customer)? Assuming that both domains pointed to the same nameservers in the end.

I know this is mostly academic because we are talking about a DNS lookup that would take at most a few hundred milliseconds and would only be relevant once at the beginning of a session. I just was curious.

I know that an uncached .com lookup will involve consulting at least one ?.gtld-servers.net. server and an uncached .com.au will involve consulting at least one ?.au. server.

Now, what I guess I'd need to know is

• Are the various ?.gtld-servers.net. servers using anycast technology that would have local fully authoritative nodes in Australia, making them just as fast to Australians as ?.au. and avoiding a 200ms+ overseas latency, or are some or all of them hosted only in the US or in the northern hemisphere?