Here's a dumb question that popped into my head. How do internet service providers get the internet in order to sell it to the rest of us?
I realized I had no idea how this works when @BlokchainB made a comment about there not being any ISPs that take bitcoin.
What if someone wanted to start a new one that does take bitcoin? Where would they start?
The internet is a network of networks ✨
Now you should be less confused
#1300247 is a good post if you want to read more
Thank you and I do sort of vaguely get it, but what is the ISP doing for me that I couldn't in theory do for myself?
You can in theory do everything yourself, that's what they did in the post.
Just like your ISP has agreements with other ISPs to give you, their customer, access to the World Wide Web, you would then need agreements with them to gain access to what they can access. These agreements basically depend on how much traffic you will send them versus how much traffic they will send you. The post mentions that same-tier ISPs might peer for free:
Btw, I applaud your interest in the internet, it's the greatest thing humanity has ever achieved (not sure if I'm joking), and more people should understand how it works, so we may be connected across the galaxies forever
https://www.cisco.com/site/us/en/learn/training-certifications/exams/ccna.html
this is how you learn how all that works, its really fascinating especially when you get to the packet switching, had to take this for my it job then renew every few years. surprisingly if i remember correctly back in the early 90s ipv6 was supposed to fix a lot of the issues we had with ipv4 address distribution, if i remember correctly ASN & BGP is how most of the routing happens these days
Not a dumb question at all. I didn't really understand it either until I looked into how internet backbones work.
What I understood until this post was that ISP are members of a big lan party of ISP connected across the world that sell their limited ports to people that can’t build their own lan party across the world.
That was vaguely what I imagined too
This is actually a great question because I realized I don’t know the answer either.
My assumption is that small ISPs buy bandwidth or transit from larger providers, who in turn connect to internet exchange points and global backbone networks. If that’s correct, accepting Bitcoin would mostly be a business decision rather than a technical limitation.
I’d be curious to hear from someone who works in networking: what is the biggest barrier to launching a Bitcoin-first ISP today? Infrastructure costs, regulation, or something else?
I think there’s just a higher level ISP that provides to those ISPs. But then that leads to the next question - where do they get it from?!
Tier 3 isps buy connectivity from other ISPs. Tier 2 ISPs buy for connectivity to some part of the internet, the rest they access by peering agreement with another ISPs (that's they agree to accept traffic with each other as long as the destination is either their own network or a network of a paying client (another ISP)). Tier 1 ISPs have peering agreements with other ISPs so that they can send traffic to the whole of internet just via the peering. They also have very large networks to begin with.
It's interesting that connectivity is mutual, but the payment has a direction (usually from the smaller to the bigger player).
I could imagine there being infrastructure or other enormous fixed costs involved in getting it to work at all, but in principle the signal and data should be accessible to anyone. At least it seems like that should be true.
I mean someone had to pay to run the lines, right? and the lines that cross the oceans, too. I think we all must pay for access to offset those costs
If it were just access to that infrastructure alone, I'd understand...sort of.
Unless it's in a literal physical location, like on the IT Crowd, it's more than simply access to a confined thing.
It's
turtlesISPs all the way downIt's ISPs all the way up until you get to the big backbone providers. Pretty interesting rabbit hole.
I feel like this is worth deep diving into.
At home, I have a cable outlet, which is connected to a modem provided to me by my ISP, which is connected to a WiFi router which I bought for myself, which connects to my devices.
I think I mostly get what the router is doing, but I'd love a step-by-step low-level tutorial of what happens to a data packet after it hits the modem.
There's some good stuff in the comments already
Somewhat simplistic explanation.
The internet is really just "peering agreements". So if you own some physical connection + own a routeable block of IPs you can enter into "peering agreements" with other similar entities and you broadcast how to route to your network and they do same. Then traffic flows.
But there is a caveat. If you are a new ISP then you must purchase your "transit" (upstream access) prior to anyone giving you a "peering agreement" that is because unless you have proven amount of traffic there is no worth to "peering" with you.
At the very top, a handful of “tier‑1” networks do not buy transit; they interconnect with each other purely via settlement‑free peering and collectively form what people colloquially call the “backbone.”
This sounds suspiciously like the banking system
the whole structure sounds very similar with licenses and reserved adress from gatekeepers.
there’s a “central ISP” per gov?
That helped a lot.
In effect, my ISP is selling me connections that no one would bother offering me on my own?
There's also the gatekeeper of IP space, specifically IP4 space, which is effectively digital real estate.
The internet is a fundamentally shitty designed. Gatekeepers and centralized organizers everywhere.
It's all just inherited from decades ago before people in western US universities and telephone networks of the past before we knew how big things would get. I can't blame them though, nobody can see the future. And the challenge was really really hard.
All freedom technologies like p2p torrenting, onion network, the lightning network etc. contain significant portions of workaround these constraints.
They basically buy bandwidth from larger network operators. Every ISP gets its connection from someone higher up the chain until you reach the global backbone.
A Bitcoin-first ISP would be pretty cool. The hard part is probably infrastructure, not payments.