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Summary: 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. 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. • 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. "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."
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. Related:
Article 10776 | Posted October 4, 2006 |
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My ISP is USFamily.net, and my access is from Qwest on DSL. I pay Qwest monthly, and have purchased the DSL modem. US Family charges annually. I don't need any of the USFamily services, my mail is hosted at work. Why can't I drop USFamily and just keep the access with Qwest?
Posted by: Lon at November 22, 2006 11:39 AMDear Leo,
I think the question Lon has (and which no website ever seems to answer) is:
Many of the wires we do our web surfing on -- residential phone lines, as well as T1 lines --
are owned by telephone companies.
Let me illustrate: Consider what happens if I browse to www.yahoo.com and retrieve their home page:
my HTTP request goes over my home phone line, to the telephone office,
through perhaps a few more steps which I don't understand yet,
onto a T1 (or broader) line, travels cross-country, and ultimately ends up at Yahoo,
through a series of wires (mostly owned by telecoms), laid end-to-end, connecting my computer to the destination.
I think what people want to know is:
Why do we introduce a break in the telecom-owned wires and insert an ISP?
What if any essential service does an ISP add to this connection?
Do we do it for historical reasons, or does the ISP add value somehow?
Must we divert every Internet communication through an ISP?
(Btw: In answer to Lon: a Qwest rep told me I don't *have* to pick a separate ISP -- that Qwest can be my phone company *and* my ISP -- but I'm still investigating that. Perhaps qwest.com is the telco and qwest.net is the Internet provider.)
-- J. E. Brown
Posted by: J. E. Brown at June 28, 2007 04:51 PM-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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Well, SOMEONE has to provide you with your internet connection :-).
You are correct, in many cases a phone company acting to provide you your
internet is at least a different division. In some cases it might even be a
technically different company with the same name as I believe Verizon (telco)
and Verizon (ISP) were or are, (not to be confused with Verizon wireless).
Providing internet connectivity is VERY different than providing phone. Yes,
they both travel over the same copper wires, but that's about it.
And to further complicate maters, on copper wire in the U.S. the telcos are
required to allow you to select someone else to be your ISP. But all that is is
a choice of allowing the telco to act as your ISP or someone else. Either way
you still have an ISP. (Cable and Fibre-optic does not have this legal
requirement, and hence your only choice for your ISP using those connections is
the provider the connection.)
Leo
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I have no phone / cable /dsl, etc. I take my laptop to a cafe/library who ever has free wireless access. Do I still need to be paying a local isp monthly. The only use I have for them - that I see - is my email , which I could do with yahoo or hotmail for no charge. Right ??? or am I clueless here ?
THANX !
Posted by: John at August 8, 2007 02:20 PMI still don't quit understand why you need an ISP. I mean does the ISP purchase a certain amount of IP addresses from the government and then just allow you to use one when you log on, or what? Who "owns" the internet? Why can't you just connect to the mac address of a friends modem? I am going to DeVry University and learning as I go but these questions have not yet been answered. I thank you for your time Leo.
Posted by: Carl Clark at January 7, 2008 06:30 PMSorry, I didn't finish last time. Is an ISP just a bunch of computers with a bunch of hard drives that webmasters upload their webpages to? The web is just a bunch of web pages isnt it? Or does the ISP mearly "patch" you through to the server of the website you are trying to access? The whole world wide web concept is just a little hard for me to wrap my head around. And also if your computer and your friends computer are both connected to the phone line then why can't you just connect to each other just like you would on a home network? It is all just so much to take in and understand.
Posted by: Carl Clark at January 7, 2008 07:01 PMHi My name is sifiso and i am an IT student doing my fist year, i would like to Know where and how do the ISP's get the internet access from? I know for a fact that i get my internet from my Service Provider but were does my service provider get the Internet
Posted by: Sifiso IT Student at May 21, 2008 06:03 AMSo why and where does the cost come into it all?
once the ISP has been established and their costs are covered - it's stil often costly to get access to the internet through them.... they provide the gateway for me to access the www - what does it cost them to provide this? besides covering their set up costs~ specially once those cost are recvovered and their making a profit - where IS the continueing cost for them ? that they pass onto us? shouldnt it be a whole lot cheaper to sign up to an ISP than it is?
-Leo
Posted by: stu at August 31, 2008 03:11 AM
i'm not trying to be redundant, i just want to try to phrase previous questions in a different way. the internet is something, and nothing. the small networks (your computers) hook up to larger networks (small ISPs like insight cable) which hook to larger ISPs (like bellsouth) who own the copper and fiber optic lines that connect to someone bigger who owns the satellites and cables running under the ocean.
If you own a cellphone, you can use it as a modem to connect to the cellphone satellites that are connected to this GIANT, CONSTANT, ALREADY-IN-PLACE network. cellphone connections are a fairly new connection type, and though they are often slow for various reasons, they are a more immediate connection to the network than going through an "ISP" who connects to someone else, who connects to the same satellite you just connected to through your phone.
since yahoo, google, ebay and every retard with a "homepage" hosted on geocities wants people to visit their websites, which are stored on their servers, which connect to an ISP who is getting paid, why aren't there more free ways to connect to this massive network? With so many entry points, why can't some of the services I already utilize be used to connect to the internet for free? Why must we pay a phone or cable company for 2 services that use the same lines? Why can't we go to a pay phone, break it open and hard wire a modem to it and hop on the INNER NETWORK?
in some cases it's as simple as security or security like features. for instance, connecting through a cellphone usually charges your phone in minutes which you pay for later, especially if you go over your allotted minutes. some cellphone providers even equate transfer size to minutes. 10KB = 1 minute, which severly limits what you can do or download.
as far as cable companies, your digital receiver sends and receives through the same fiber optic wires as your cable modem, however the wires are internally divided up into channels. TV uses channels whatever through whatever, and the rest are for other services: internet, phone, etc.
even if you were able somehow to tap into those channels to try to get free internet, once you connect to the cable company's network, their security would probably detect that connection and they would either kill it or track it, or both. same with the cellphones. these companies pay their ISPs for their connections to the backbone networks and they do everything they can to prevent people from bypassing their accounting offices.
i guess my question now is, are there any entry points that have little to no security and would allow you to reach out and touch some larger networks who don't guard their internet connection?
Posted by: skary at September 11, 2008 08:51 PMI'm still wondering about the whole IP address thing... is there an IP Police? Who makes sure no two computers have the same IP? Since corporations often use DHCP to dynamically assign IPs to the computers on their network, is there a way for them to know that all of their computers have unique IPs from every other pc in the world? Is this one of the jobs of an ISP?
Posted by: Mark at September 12, 2008 05:48 PM