What is the internet?

[caboose]

Hi, everyone.

This is a question that has been bothering me for a while.

I have recently started doing a cert 3 TAFE course in IT, and we get told that the Internet is basically a WAN. But if the Internet is, at it's roots, a network, then what exactly do we pay ISP's for?

If the Internet is just a network, shouldn't that mean that all you should need is some kind of wireless connection device and you should be able to connect to the Internet?

If there is a simple answer, please tell me, or at least try to explain it to me, Please.

[rokytnji]

what exactly do we pay ISP's for?

For the convenience of being able to connect at your residence.
I can connect to the internet at any rest stop on the freeway in Texas accessing their free wifi connection. Hafta drive to get there though. Same as with Libraries.

If the Internet is just a network, shouldn't that mean that all you should need is some kind of wireless connection device and you should be able to connect to the Internet?

Explained in above statement.

[GNU-Fan]

If the Internet is just a network, shouldn't that mean that all you should need is some kind of wireless connection device and you should be able to connect to the Internet?

There are proponents who suggest we should do just that.
Eben Moglen, for example, often demands the end of spectrum regulation and reduced liability of the "access providers" in his talks.

With that the Internet would become more ad-hoc like. Like ham radio or a bunch of OLPC XO-1s.

At the moment, I see three problems.
How to assign IPs?
Bandwidth and performance would probably be too small.
It's hard to cross the oceans.

[jayd512]

then what exactly do we pay ISP's for?

For maintaining the lines, routers, head-ends and servers.
Usage of primary and secondary DNS servers.

Other than that, I second what roky said above.

[samsonite2010]

The infrastructure of the "Internet" has cost quite a lot of money to put in place. Most of it has been invested in by telecommunications companies over many years and I believe ISPs have to pay the owners of the infrastructure in some way. It is different depending on which country you are in - some places will never give you free access as such. Free Wifi is free for you, but somebody is paying to connect to the WAN. The owners of the infrastructures may even offer free access in certain places, but the key is that they control it...

That's what I think anyway!

[jasonresurrection87]

essentially yea. telcos lay the cable lines, isps rent from them and gouge to you. it is its own self contained network, you can have other "internets" (that really aren't the internet but their own network). netsukuku is its own network though using internet protocols. technically you could say the internet is a subset of the world wide web lol

[caboose]

Okay, so that sort of answers my question, but I have another one. If , as we seem to have agreed, the Internet is nothing but a massive network, then what is "online".

If the Internet is a network, then what is the term online mean. I have connected to other networks before, but it has not said anything about online, It just says that I have joined a network.

So, what is this fictional term of "online"?

[rcgreen]

Online is when a host is running and connected to a network.
If a server is online it is available, connected.

[samsonite2010]

Online is not specific to the internet. It generally means someone or something is connected to a host or a network and available. Online was a term used long before the WWW (e.g. for printers), but by popular definition it is often used to mean that you are connected to the WWW (which is itself just a system that lives within the bounds of the Internet).