Why do you need an 'ISP'?

BunnyKillBot

BunnyKillBot

BunnyKillBot

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My wife asked me this question the other day, and i thought, fair point, i have no idea. The telecom companies already charge you line rental for the physical connection, which is really just a tap into the packet switching network. Everything else is trivial, IP assignment, DNS etc. It seems to me the price for an internet connection is vastly higher than the associate costs of actually delivering the (often mediocre) service.
 
Someone has to maintain the lines between your house and DNS/improve the service.

Besides who else is going to impliment website blocking.

Very good point though! There must be something I'm missing.

BunnyKillBot said:
It seems to me the price for an internet connection is vastly higher than the associate costs of actually delivering the (often mediocre) service.
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To be fair that's how any buisness would ideally run :D.
 
is it even possible to get online without an isp? even if it is then I'd imagine it's more expensive than going with an ISP.

what would be your options satellite ?
 
IP Assignment may seem trivial technically (your router requests one from the ISP and you get given the next available address in the pool) but there's more to it than that. Your ISP needs to buy these addresses first, and to do that I think they need to have various licences/registrations.

DNS only translates domains to ip addresses. You still need to know where that address is.
Try a tracert of an ipaddress, how many nodes does it pass through? How many of them belong to your ISP? Somebody has to pay for and maintain these.


arknor said:
is it even possible to get online without an isp?
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Depends what you mean by "online"?
My (uneducated) guess is that it may be possible to remotely communicate with another computer without an ISP, but not loading www pages.

arknor said:
what would be your options satellite ?
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Satellite still needs all the same infrastructure as normal internet, it just replaces the wired link between you and the exchange with a satellite relay.
 
It wouldn't work to have completely un regulated internet - service would be shocking for a start and the whole network would be at maximum capacity way too quickly as there would be funds to assist in the cost involved with upgrading the networks.
 
touch said:
Depends what you mean by "online"?
My (uneducated) guess is that it may be possible to remotely communicate with another computer without an ISP, but not loading www pages.
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That would work but outwith LAN it would still require some sort of ISP to remotely connect the device in the first place - whether it be via your phones internet etc
 
C35799Gamble said:
It wouldn't work to have completely un regulated internet - service would be shocking for a start and the whole network would be at maximum capacity way too quickly as there would be funds to assist in the cost involved with upgrading the networks.
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peer to peer network :P
 
C35799Gamble said:
That would work but outwith LAN it would still require some sort of ISP to remotely connect the device in the first place - whether it be via your phones internet etc
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Yep, you're right. It definitely needs some form of routing.

arknor said:
peer to peer network :P
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But you're not connected to any peers? You're connected to an ISP which can then route you to a peer for what we call "peer to peer" networks.
Unless you plan on laying your own cables to directly connect you to a peer? If we all did that we could have something similar to internet without ISPs ;)
 
The ISP provide the IP addressing, and also connectivity in to their network, which then routes over various routers/LNS's, what ever which eventually goes out via a carrier wholesale company that the said ISP use.
 
The ISP is just one tier of the internet. The Tier 1 networks will sell access to the tier 2 and 3 networks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network

Without the tier 3 networks the tier 1 and 2 would have to change the way they do business, they don't deal with the end user and have to deal with everything that the tier 3 isp have to deal with, like support, supplying hardware and arranging installations etc.
 
As he said. Your charged by your ISP to connect to their network because they pay someone else for connection to a network or service, and so on.

Eventually you could probably trace your money back to funding a fibre line under the sea or a piece of networking hardware in a central hub.
 
If you do a trace route out to the internet, you will probably see your packets going through your ISP's network, then out on to a carrier (someone like Cogent, or Level3, or who ever, depends who your ISP use as a carrier) before it hops over on to the destination network hops
 
BunnyKillBot said:
My wife asked me this question the other day, and i thought, fair point, i have no idea. The telecom companies already charge you line rental for the physical connection, which is really just a tap into the packet switching network. Everything else is trivial, IP assignment, DNS etc. It seems to me the price for an internet connection is vastly higher than the associate costs of actually delivering the (often mediocre) service.
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The rest isn't trivial, and if you look at the cost of the hardware needed and the skill/cost of that skill to build and maintain these things you'd think again. I'm sure you could get a fibre to a datacentre for a few thousand and then go through the rigmarole of getting an AS number and setting up BGP relationships with a couple of Tier 1 providers. Yeah, easy.
 
BunnyKillBot said:
Everything else is trivial, IP assignment, DNS etc.
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Not at ISP scale it isn't. if you want IP assignment and DNS servers keeping up 24x7x365 it needs serious server hardware, multiple sites for redundancy + failover, operations people available all the time (so shift work) to support it and regular network maintenance.

You need techs to go out to customer sites for installations and fixing faults.

You need network monitoring to stop rogue customers stuffing it up for everyone else.

You need people to manage all this as well as billing, customer services etc.

It all adds up !

I've worked for a systems supplier to some very big name ISP's world-wide for 15 years now. It gets more complex, not less.
 
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