Internet service provider

Internet service provider

An Internet service provider (abbr. ISP, also called Internet access provider or IAP) is a business or organization that provides consumers or businesses access to the Internet and related services. In the past, most ISPs were run by the phone companies. Now, ISPs can be started by just about any individual or group with sufficient money and expertise. In addition to Internet access via various technologies such as dial-up and DSL, they may provide a combination of services including Internet transit, domain name registration and hosting, web hosting, and colocation.

ISPs employ a range of technologies to enable consumers to connect to their network. For "home users", the most popular options include dial-up, DSL (typically ADSL), Broadband wireless access, Cable modem, and ISDN (typically BRI). For customers who have more demanding requirements, such as medium-to-large businesses, or other ISPs, DSL (often SHDSL or ADSL), Ethernet, Metro Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, Frame Relay, ISDN (BRI or PRI), ATM, satellite Internet access and SONET are more likely. With the increasing popularity of downloading music and online video and the general demand for faster page loads, higher bandwidth connections are becoming more popular.

Just as their customers pay them for Internet access, ISPs themselves pay upstream ISPs for Internet access. In the simplest case, a single connection is established to an upstream ISP using one of the technologies described above, and the ISP uses this connection to send or receive any data to or from parts of the Internet beyond its own network; in turn, the upstream ISP uses its own upstream connection, or connections to its other customers (usually other ISPs) to allow the data to travel from source to destination.

In reality, the situation is often more complicated. For example, ISPs with more than one point of presence (PoP) may have separate connections to an upstream ISP at multiple PoPs, or they may be customers of multiple upstream ISPs and have connections to each one at one or more of their PoPs. ISPs may engage in peering, where multiple ISPs interconnect with one another at a peering point or Internet exchange point (IX), allowing the routing of data between their networks, without charging one another for that data - data that would otherwise have passed through their upstream ISPs, incurring charges from the upstream ISP. ISPs that require no downstream and have only customers and/or peers, are called Tier 1 ISPs, indicating their status as ISPs at the top of the Internet hierarchy. Routers, switches, Internet routing protocols, and the expertise of network administrators all have a role to play in ensuring that data follows the best available route and that ISPs can "see" one another on the Internet.

Internet service providers in India

Tata Indicom, Sify, Airtel, Reliance, Asianet, Bsnl, etc

Broadband

Broadband

Broadband in telecommunications is a term that refers to a signaling method that includes or handles a relatively wide range of frequencies, which may be divided into channels or frequency bins. Broadband is always a relative term, understood according to its context. The wider the bandwidth, greater is the information carrying capacity. In radio, for example, a very narrow-band signal will carry Morse code; a broader band will carry speech; a still broader band is required to carry music without losing the high audio frequencies required for realistic sound reproduction. A television antenna described as "normal" may be capable of receiving a certain range of channels; one described as "broadband" will receive more channels. In data communications a modem will transmit a bandwidth of 64 kilobits per seconds (kbit/s) over a telephone line; over the same telephone line a bandwidth of several megabits per second can be handled by ADSL, which is described as broadband (relative to a modem over a telephone line, although much less than can be achieved over a fibre optic circuit, for example).

Broadband in data communications can refer to Broadband Networks or Broadband internet and may have the same meaning as above, so that data transmission over a fiber optic cable would be referred to as broadband as compared to a telephone modem operating at 600 bits per second.

However, broadband in data communications is frequently used in a more technical sense to refer to data transmission where multiple pieces of data are sent simultaneously to increase the effective rate of transmission, regardless of actual data rate. In network engineering this term is used for methods where two or more signals share a medium.[citation needed]

The various forms of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) services are broadband in the sense that digital information is sent over a high-bandwidth channel above the baseband voice channel on a single pair of wires.[citation needed]

A baseband transmission sends one type of signal using a medium's full bandwidth, as in 100BASE-T Ethernet. Ethernet, however, is the common interface to broadband modems such as DSL data links, and has a high data rate itself, so is sometimes referred to as broadband. Ethernet provisioned over cable modem is a common alternative to DSL

The Broadband Revolution

The International Telecommunications Union recently issued a press release announcing with joy the release of “the first set of global standards for Internet Protocol TV (IPTV).” A key sentence:

A combination of voice, Internet and video services over a single broadband link and from a single provider is foreseen as the ultimate goal of the broadband revolution.

Those of you who lived through ‘What Is Broadband Good For?’ with me last summer (first post here) know that the word “broadband” is a pet bugaboo of mine. It’s a word that answers a lot of policy questions in a particular way. It connotes (and denotes) a speeded, managed “service” that happens to use the Internet Protocol but is ultimately completely within the discretionary control of the network provider. So when the ITU talks about “the broadband revolution,” they mean (I think) the rise of these speeded, managed “services” provided by telephone companies. And the stated goal—made express in this press release—is to combine “services” over single broadband links and “from” a single provider. Revolutionary! Remarkably similar to cable television with a cellphone overlay.

I’m not going to say “I told you so,” but this is why the AT&T/BellSouth merger conditions a year ago were not unmixed great news. I said at the time (so I guess I am saying I told you so) that AT&T’s promise as part of that merger to keep its “wireline broadband Internet access service” neutral didn’t actually cover its planned IPTV service, which it calls its “AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet U-verse Enabled” service. That won’t be neutral—ever—unless things change rather dramatically in this country. I think consumers will be offered “internet” as *part* of their subscription to IPTV, IPTV will definitely affect “bandwidth management,” and “internet” won’t be what we thought it was.