Schust38
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Internet service provider article
editHi! I gather that you're working on the Internet service provider article as part of Media and Telecommunication Policy. In which case, I'm hoping to help out as a mentor for the project. If you have any questions, feel free to toss them my way - I'm online fairly often, and I can be reached through this talk, my talk or email, as you see fit.
You've chosen a good topic, so this should be interesting. :) - Bilby (talk) 14:28, 3 March 2011 (UTC)
Assignment 6
editHow an Internet Service Provider works:
Internet Service Providers work by serving as an intermediate connection between home users to their destinations.[1] 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. [2]
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.[3]
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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 [4], which authorizes ISPs to report websites hosting child pornography along with the host’s information. 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.
Notes
editNotes
editInternet service provider
editHi! Nice start on the above work. :) As a suggestion, though, it might be better to develop it at User talk:Schust38/Internet service provider, as that way it won't get mixed up with any comments you get here. - Bilby (talk) 13:45, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
Assignment 7
edithttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Schust38/Internet_service_provider