Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is the company you pay a fee to for access to the internet. No matter the kind of internet access (cable, DSL, dial-up), an ISP provides you or your business a piece of a larger pipe to the internet.
All internet connected devices run each request through their ISP in order to access servers to download web pages and files, and those servers themselves can only provide you those files through their own ISP.
Examples of some ISPs include AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Cox, NetZero, among many, many others. They may be wired directly to a home or business or beamed wirelessly via satellite or other technology.
What Does an ISP Do?
We all have some sort of device in our home or business that connects us to the internet. It's through that device that your phone, laptop, desktop computer, and other internet capable devices reach the rest of the world - and it's all done through various ISPs.
Let's look at an example of where the Internet Service Provider falls in the chain of events that lets you download files and open web pages from the internet...
Say you're using a laptop at home to access this page on About.com. Your web browser first uses the DNS servers that are setup on your device to translate the "About.com" domain name to the proper IP address that it's associated with (which is the address that About.com is setup to use with its own ISP).
The IP address you want to access is then sent from your router to your ISP, which forwards the request to the ISP that About.com uses.
At this point, About.com's ISP is able to send this http://pcsupport.about.com/od/termsi/g/isp.htm file (the HTM file that is this page) back to your own ISP, which forwards the data to your home router and back to your laptop.
All of this is done rather quickly - usually in seconds, which is actually pretty remarkable. None of it would be possible unless both your home network and About.com's network have a valid public IP address, which is assigned by an ISP.
The same concept applies to sending and downloading other files like videos, images, documents, etc. - anything that you download online is only able to be transferred through an ISP.
Is The ISP Experiencing Network Issues or Am I?
It's rather pointless to go through all the troubleshooting steps to repair your own network if your ISP is the one that has the problem... but how do you know if it's your network or the Internet Service Provider that is to blame?
The easiest thing to do if you can't open a website is to try a different one. If other websites work just fine then it's obviously neither your computer nor your ISP that's having issues - it's either the web server that's dishing out the website or the ISP that the website is using to deliver the website. There's nothing you can do but wait for them to resolve it.
If none of the w
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