User talk:Schust38/Internet service provider

Assignment 7
Internet Service Provider

An Internet Service Provider positions itself as a gateway to the Internet liable of legal and ethical duties. The ability of anonymous users to transfer data to other users could develop certain risk factors for the internet users and it is the responsibility of the ISP to regulate such activities in general public’s interest. People use internet in their everyday life to enhance businesses, transfer secure information, educational purposes and making secure communications; all this is possible because our ISPs make an effort everyday to make our lives easy and secure.

ISPs play a very vital role when it comes to copyright protection law. Limiting a person’s access to the internet to protect someone else’s copy righted work comes within the range of many other powers most of the ISPs have. They may decide to block a person’s access to a certain website or take a direct action against the customer for violating a Copy Right law.

Their powers are not just limited to regulating a person’s access to websites, but also, they are eligible to search and scan content of a particular website and the host of that particular website could be charged if found guilty for certain acts, like violation of the Protection of Children From Sexual Predators Act, which authorizes ISPs to report websites hosting child pornography along with the host’s information. Studies show that the filtering approach is both effective and ineffective in regulating this sort of content. Large ISPs may use automated bots, like Wikipedia uses Wikipedia Bots, to regulate content in their domain making data transfer as secure and as legal as possible.

There are certain types of ISP’s called the Second-level ISP's which basically deal with the Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and SSH tunnel or ‘port forwarding’. They are considered to be the anonymous internet access providers which help to provide secure and anonymous internet access to customers. As most of the ISP’s now log all the incoming and outgoing data including upload and download, emails and files transfers and even passwords, so that they can regulate content over the internet. Many argue that such activity by the ISP is violating the right to privacy. Some of the personal privacy reasons are to access anonymously financial institutions and online casinos, to bypass any kind of internet censorship and to anonymize internet activities. Meanwhile, business reasons are to have an all-in-one secure remote access to the company’s computers, protect employees while on travel and protect the company from government intrusions or competitors

Selecting an ISP is a crucial decision for the consumers; everybody would want to have an ISP which has an impressive host network performance. The peak time for a network is usually considered to be between 6pm to 8pm because that is the time when people are back to their homes from work. As a part of current communication tradition, families tend not to communicate with each other and rather log on to social media web-sited and use them as their primary means of communication. Therefore, this is when an ISP’s network is the busiest. There are lots of tests which can be performed on the network, such as ‘ping’ or MTR which can help to determine an ISP’s performance.

Second thing to consider while choosing an ISP should be its good track record of network reliability. Most of the population doesn’t quite know that hosts with minimum or no bad reviews usually mean that those hosts / ISP’s are pretty good at their service. Most of the ISP’s have public forums such as web hosting talk page through which users can review their performance. Trying to search for the potential ISP on such forums could provide the insights of the service provider, for example: searching for “bandwidth provider” in the U.S. As an alternative, search engines like Google could probably bring out a few results. It should not be surprising if the ISP did not get good reviews on their forums. Often, the reviews are negative, possibly because of a complaint. Therefore, reviews cannot completely justify whether an ISP is doing a good job or not. A huge number of bad reviews could mean one of two things. Maybe the IP Transit host is not particularly a good one or the ISP is so large and spread out in terms of users and facilities. More the number of customers an ISP supports more would be the chances to have that small number of people who would find the slightest fault and mention it in the discussion forums when nothing major is wrong.

ISPs are also playing an important role in privacy in our country. The number of John Doe subpoenas sent to ISPs continues to grow while ISPs must decide how to act on each one. They are being asked for the true identities of people using pseudonyms in places such as internet message boards and comment sections of online stories. In the past ISPs have been the targets when their subscribers have posted or uploaded obscene or illegal material online, it is now to the point where the ISP must decide whether to give over the personal information of their customers or continue to protect them while facing possible punishments of their own. This makes for interesting ethical and business decisions as they want to keep as many paying customers and possible, while also protecting themselves from possible lawsuits.

Internet Service Providers capping use:
Internet Service Providers are also a very important part of the net neutrality debate. When a person is using bandwidth to do something on the internet that competes against a product the ISP offers, the provider can throttle bandwidth to make things run much slower. The most recent ruling pertaining to internet service providers approved rules that would ban ISPs from unreasonably discriminating against lawful network traffic or blocking lawful content, applications, service, and non-harmful devices on fixed networks. This ruling makes it harder for ISPs to block a service like Netflix to drive more customers to their OnDemand content. ISPs are starting to implement usage caps in an effort to keep high bandwidth users from clogging up the system and slowing down service to all other customers.

Comcast: 250 gigabyte cap
 * AT&T DSL: 150 gigabyte cap
 * AT&T U-Verse: 210 gigabyte cap
 * Charter Lite/Express: 100 gigabyte cap
 * Charter Plus/Max: 250 gigabyte cap

In the case of AT&T and Charter if you go over the cap you will be charged an additional fee. If you go over the Comcast cap twice in a six month period Comcast threatens to cut off your service.

How an Internet Service Provider works:
Internet Service Providers work by serving as an intermediate connection between home users to their destinations. Without using an ISP the home user would not have access to the website they are trying to reach, and without customers ISPs would not have anyone to deliver to the website. When you make a connection to your ISP you become part of their network. The ISP is connected to a larger network giving you the access to the interconnected series of networks. ISPs connect to each other using Network access point. The easiest way to think of it is, without an ISP the internet would still be out there, but you would be left without a connection.

Size of Internet Service Providers:
As of Feburary 2010, Comcast was the largest ISP in the United States at 15.9 million broadband users. AT&T is the second largest at 15.7 million broadband users, and Time Warner Cable was the third largest at over 9 million users. The size of dial-up ISPs such as AOL continue to decline as high speed internet is becoming more and more widely available throughout the rural United States.

List of ISPs:
A list of some of the most common ISPs in the United States.

Dial-UP


 * Basic ISP
 * CogniSurf
 * Copper Internet
 * NetZero
 * USNationwide

Broadband


 * AT&T
 * Charter
 * Comcast
 * Cox
 * EarthLink
 * Time Warner Cable
 * Road Runner