Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
When you connect to your ISP you are connecting directly to the internet. You can bypass your ISP, if you like, but only to choose another ISP to do the same.
I connect to the www through a hosting company (www provider) through my router; I have a fixed IP address. Question how does this hosting company connect to the www and why can't we mortals do that directly from home IP to IP.
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Well, you can, if your wallet is big enough.
But the real problem here is that there's a misunderstanding of just what the internet is. For example, "www", or World Wide Web, is just a part of the internet.
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This starts to sound kind of Zen, but the internet is everything, and the internet is nothing.
There is no single thing I can point to and say "this, this thing right here that your ISP connects to, that is the internet". It just doesn't work that way.
If we look at it differently, your ISP is the internet. When you connect to your service provider, you are connecting to the internet right there.
Think about it -- if you send email to a friend of yours that uses the same service provider that you do, that email goes from your machine to the service provider to your friends machine. It never had to go anywhere else that your service provider might be connected to, and still, it did go over the internet - your service provider's little corner of the internet.
The internet isn't really a thing that ISPs hook up to. It's more like a side effect of the fact that all the ISPs are connecting to each other in various and fairly random ways.
Now, in the case of a small ISP, they may get their connectivity to the rest of the internet by purchasing a connection from a larger ISP. Typically it's an extremely high speed or high bandwidth connection. A good ISP will connect to the rest of the internet using more than one such connection, from more than one provider, to balance the load, and provide fault tolerance should one of the connections drop.
Larger ISPs, such as AOL, earthlink and others may not have a need to connect to an upstream ISP, since that's already them. Instead, the larger ISP's negotiate connectivity between themselves. This allows you, through your little ISP to get connectivity to everyone that your ISP, and your ISP's ISP, (and perhaps your ISP's ISP's ISP, and so on) can connect to.
The point is simply that there's no central point.
One of the reasons the word "web" is so appropriate in World Wide Web is because that's a much more accurate picture of how things interconnect. Between any two points on a spider web, there are hundreds if not thousands of ways to get from point A to point B. The internet works (roughly) the same way.
So, could you connect directly to whomever your ISP connects to? Probably. In fact, that's what many large corporations do ... they skip the low level ISPs completely and purchase bandwidth in bulk from larger service providers. You could do that to, provided you were willing to spend the money to do so, and have the technical ability to set up your side of the connectivity. It's rare that the upstream network providers are set up to also deal with single user / home / small business connectivity.
Article C2802 - October 4, 2006 « »
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
March 5, 2011 12:12 AM
i think the growth of the internet is outpacing how much security the ISPs can handle. in time, i think internet will be free, perhaps not in our generation, but possibly the next one. there are some city and corporate combined efforts to offer free internet. for example, in san francisco, google is/was supposed to make all internet free in public places. i don't recall the details of it, but i would guess that the larger players kept it from happening since they would lose a decent chunk of revenue in a rather large metro. i can speculate that google was willing to do so because free internet means more people on the web and likely using google in some way which would increase their revenue and such.
i'm not a fan of having to pay for internet, but if you think about it, for $30-$60/month you get access to the entire freaking world. and unless you have the money (and authorization to do so) to buy a satellite and setup your own mini web through a system of networks that connects to the great big web that is the internet, you're going to be stuck paying for it.
if you want free internet, the only ways that i think are possible without owning a giant corporation are to steal it from your neighbor as someone mentioned above, or have an intricate knowledge of how it all works so you can maximize the inefficiencies in the system.
May 2, 2011 8:07 PM
If an ISP provides the copper for our internet, when when is this copper paid off. We get charged month after month for this copper that is in place and sure server cost money with cooling,repairs and, upgrades. I think the first questions is when will internet be free, since the existing copper lines and fiber optics cables will be paid for eventually, as well as the servers, so only electricity and labor will be the only cost of ISP's at some point.
03-May-2011
May 22, 2011 1:31 AM
how can you have free internet? what would you use it on? Do you want free computer systems, free electricity, a free house to use it in? No what we don't like is the open ended thing of paying an ISP a subscription each month, and if you look at it that way I suppose it's the single most costly item in our setups, I shudder to think how much I have spent over the 8 years I have been hooked up to my ISP. Currently I pay £28 per month for a 30 meg connection, I have just downgraded from 50 meg which was about £45 a month but was too much for me and quite high, if I had saved £45 in a bank account for 2+ years I could have bought my dream PC, with bleeding edge top end everything. I think I am correct in saying that local calls are/used to be free in the States and that is the reason why the internet took of in the first place, so if this is true there is your free internet, completely unusable by today's standards, but that what we all fell in love with.
January 6, 2012 10:21 PM
I am hosting two servers, one for a web application and another for svn. In one month I consumed 25$ worth of electricity... There is no such thing as free internet.
September 17, 2012 3:26 PM
The internet is free. What you pay for is access to it via the ISP's satellites, cables and/phone lines. The only way not to pay is to become a multi-billionaire and lay some lines and/or launch your own satellites. In a nutshell of course.