Focus on a supplier

Isp stands for Internet assistance Provider. It provides Internet passage via its own Internet connection. In fact, it's like a dealer who buys from the distributor and sells at retail.

A victualer has one or more connections to the Internet but of an additional one kind (a bandwidth much larger and more technologically complicated). This bandwidth is shared between these customers so that his investment is profitable.

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For example, with a association of 100 Mb/s he will not sell 1 Mb/s to a 100 customers!

It does not work like that. It is based on statistics and specific parameters (time, region, type of customers... Etc.). If he expects 40% of simultaneous connections in the worst case, he can sell 1Mb/s to 250 customers instead of 100. Earning two and half times more money. Although, he does not cheat, he is sure that no more than 40% of the total customers will work simultaneously (some work only at night, others during office hours etc...)

Now let's get to the technical part.

To conduct all these customers, he needs a range of services and skilled personnel to articulate and administer. These services range from a call-center (which he many subcontract with other companies) to security through the mail.

1. Routers: underlying gadget for the Internet, basically the router handles the Internet traffic entering and exiting and make sure the data reaches the destination among any routes. The other features are too complex to be detailed in this article.

2. Radius: The radius allows the assistance victualer to control and catalogue the client passage (username, password, hours, credits...).

3. Firewall: Sometimes integrated into the router, it allows the victualer to safe themselves as well as the customers from the majority of Internet attacks. It may block unavoidable ports open and others as accepted but that does not mean in any way a buyer is protected. A personal firewall is always strongly recommended for the user.

4. QoS: quality Of Service: is not optionally used but can conduct the quality of assistance by balancing the load and bandwidth. For example, the victualer may limit the download to 30kb/sec/user for a group of customers to make the users will have the same chances.

5. Links: via modems or other devices, these links can be terrestrial or satellite and or both together but this is transparent to most users.

6. Monitoring: These systems can enduringly monitor the execution of the other services and alert administrators to any fault (either by email, phone, beeper, Sms...)

The victualer may furnish other services such as Voip (Voice Over Ip), messaging services.

All these systems hosted on servers or devices and adding the cabling is the Noc (Network Operations Center).

Comparing to former years, these services are increasingly remarkable and have a failure rate much lower. But the team that keeps these systems up and running and make sure you have a continuous assistance are always unknown people.

But we commonly forget that a assistance Up for 99.9% of the time is an perfect service.

Focus on a supplier

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