Posted on 12/14/2013 9:44:32 AM PST by knarf
An ISP can be very small with a few thousand customers, or large, with millions.
/johnny
Providing Internet service?
They keep the old folks from getting stuck on the intertubes and can’t get out like used to happen on AOL, lol.
So the old or traditional telephone/communication system is the root to ISPing ?
Overlogging. Great Episode. Grapes of Wrath Meets Interweb Wasteland.
/johnny
Your scenario relies on infrastructure that can be shut down.
Electricity, water, sewer, telephone, cell, all rely on large interconnected and complex infrastructure. Radio is your best bet, although that can be jammed or used to locate you.
2) There are various anonymizer products that supposedly allow you to surf anonymously. But there are articles suggesting that none of those methods are foolproof.
3) You can limit your surfing to public computers at libraries, etc. where hopefully there are no cameras recording who is logging on to which computer at which time.
4) You can get rid of all of your Windows computers and stick to Linux. Get yourself a router, etc. and try and isolate yourself more from the network, viruses, spyware, etc.
5) At some point in the future it might be easy to get throwaway pad computers. Then you can login to various public WiFi systems with a throwaway computer for a week or a month, then throw it away and get a new one.
6) More and more everything in a computer has some sort of low-level ID encoded in it so that when your computer hooks up to the network those ID's can be read and your computer can be identified. If you are knowledgeable enough you might be able to modify these ID's so that every time you connect up your computer looks different to the net. However, these ID's are also used to allow you to gain access to certain services. For example, if more and more software it put on "the cloud" then you may not be able to access that software unless your computer is recognized as having paid for that service. So going forward anonymous computers might have a harder time accessing information on the internet.
7) Move to a town where you can still do all your business by mail or in person. Decide that the internet is no better than TV, mostly useless crap, and disconnect.
The function of the ISP has already be discussed.
The options are really just alternatives and not the internet. These would include WiFi mesh networks (meshnet), phone based bulletin boards (BBS) and ham radio based BBS networks. None of these are internet per se.
/johnny
Considering I used to be an ISP from 1995 - 1998 I'm fairly qualified to answer that question.
At a high level, your ISP provides you with the necessary services to get to the Internet.
The ISP therefore provides you with your initial contact (dial-up modem, cable modem, dsl, etc..) into their Service.
The ISP provides their users with basic Domain Name Services, which translate the "www.freerepublic.com" you typed to get here to Free Republic's IP Address of 209.157.64.201.
Once the IP address is obtained, your request is sent out to the Internet via your ISP's Routers, Switches and Gateway's (all good ISP's have multiple paths to ensure a connection.) Your browsers requests to Free Republic are forwarded from your ISP to your ISP's internet POP (the first hop) which then calculates the next step in the route your browsers traffic must take to reach FR.
Each hop and subsequent hop calculates the best route to take until your web browsers requests finally reach FR, which then responds back to your browser.
In addition to basic DNS and Routing services, ISP's may provide email, email hosting, web hosting and other services.
When I started up my ISP business back in 1995, my initial investment was north of $250,000 for the "entry level" equipment I needed to provide connectivity to my customers to reach the internet. That equipment consisted of a large bank of dial-up modems, ISDN connectivity, DSL connectivity and T-1 connectivity for my corporate customers.
I also had to acquire and implement basic routing, email/smtp services, firewall services and disk storage facilities for customers emails, web pages and other data that they preferred to store on the Internet.
By the time I left that business several years later, I had just over $2m in equipment and facilities running that business along with 22 employees, 2 data centers and office space.
It wasn't cheap.
bump
The funniest part of the episode was when an “old timer’ was explaining back in the day that he could go to Radio shack and buy a router then he started breaking down..
A simple Spark Gap Generator which is easily built can jam alot of bandwidth. Cell band jammer's aren't hard to build and implement either. If you know where to look for them, a decent one can be had for under $50 which can easily be expanded and output power boosted to increase its range.
I think I'm asking a pretty good question here, and people wiser than I are answering ... what if I was an uber wealthy guy with the determination to build my own ISP ... I wouldn't be able to network (like now) to assist in my endeavor
I'm not wealthy ... but I do ask questions.
You can always be your own.
“My Own Private ISP
Setting up your own Internet service provider can sometimes be the only way to get satisfactory Internet access options.”
http://www.datamation.com/erp/article.php/615281/My-own-private-ISP.htm
Can you use the phone without a phone company? I guess you could yell out of the window.
Dang it, wish I had thought of that before writing my "War and Peace" length reply.
Well done.
“WiFi”
Where does “WiFi” go?
It goes, at some necessary point, through either someone’s “hot spot” or a celluar phone system which in either case are entrances to an “ISP” service run by some entity, either in the first of second stage of that entrance.
If it is to someone’s “hot spot”, and that someone is not provding “WiFi” connection to a mobile phone network, but to their own wireless hub, then that hub is using an “ISP” connection to complete your connection to the Internet. If it is to mobile phone service, then the provider of that mobile phone service is either running an ISP service within their own network, and connection you to it, or they are connecting you through to an ISP service somewhere.
You may not, in some few circumstances, require an ISP directly, but if not directly then indirectly you do.
And it is unfeasible for most people, for their uses of the Internet, to do all they want to do via the Internet, with “free” “WiFi” connections. At certain times? Yes. In general? No.
/johnny
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