Internet and DNS Issues

First, some background:
About a month ago I started having issues with Safari. It would load some pages pretty well, but others would "stall" halfway through loading the blue bar at the top. If I let it sit there, it would eventually time out. The only way I could get these sites to load was by hitting refresh over and over again until eventually it loaded the whole page at once. I searched around for a while and found lots of people having similar issues with Safari, saying that Firefox, Camino, or Opera fixed their problems. I downloaded those other web browsers, but they were having the same problem.

I kept searching and eventually found someone saying that it could be a DNS issue and directed people to opendns.com

I followed their directions and manually inputed their two DNS servers into my settings. Since then, my internet has worked flawlessly in Safari.

My question is this: I have 2 roommates who haven't had any issues with their internet doing this at all. If the DNS Servers for my ISP are faulty, shouldn't they be having the problems as well?

Secondly: Is there any downside in continuing to use opendns?
Should I report to my ISP about their DNS Servers not working for me? (I would probably be wasting my time, it is Charter Communications and they have notoriously bad customer service).

I'm in slightly over my head and would love some clarification from you guys about why this was a problem for me and not my roommates, and how my solution worked?

Thanks!

Did you manually enter your ISP's DNS servers? Or were they provided via DHCP from a router? Are the DNS servers entered statically in the router? Are they old?

Try these:

151.202.0.85
151.203.0.85

Those are Verizon DNS Servers. Try manually entering Charters DNS servers.

I doubt it is Charters DNS servers.

Which Mac do you have and what OS are you using?

The problem you're describing can also be attributed to particular Airport cards running under Leopard. Mine included - a late 2006 MBP. There are some that had success using the OpenDNS servers. For me, it did not. The only thing that worked on mine was turning Airport off and back on, then hitting the refresh button. I could then count on at least one page loading properly. The 10.5.2 update has repaired this problem, at least on my MBP.

I did a clean install of Leopard, 2 days before 10.5.2 hit (again), just to make sure it wasn't something I had done to the system.

Just to note, the MB in the house exhibited none of these issues.

As to reporting it to Charter, it would probably never go past the level 1 tech that answered the phone.