In general, as data flows through the internet, who (types of
companies and technologies that they use) gets paid for this service
and how do they get paid?

Hello wawiii,

Thank you for your question about who gets paid on the internet. It is
generally the end user that pays. For example we may pay a flat
monthly fee to the ISP (internet service provider). A good answer to
this question can be also found at

http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/8015/fid/133

It is typically major telecommunication companies that are maintined
by telecommunication consumers in individual countries. Ultimately
companies pay for gigabytes of information that go in and out of the
country.

But individual institutions may pay for access at various levels.  So
the universities pay an amount to a bigger telecommunication company.
This amount then goes for maintaining fibre optic links through oceans
etc.

So in answer to your questions, who gets paid? various organisations
eg AT&T Bell etc) technologies they use are typically large servers
and optical fibre networks. They are paid by either individual
consumers or by institutions.


I hope this helps, please ask for clarifications if necessary.

kind regards

rcd-ga

further links:

	http://www.antcrc.utas.edu.au/ib/netintro.html#whopays
	provides a another quick another quick answer


	http://www.globusz.com/ebooks/email/00000015.htm
	provides quite a nice explantion too.

search strategy

://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22who+pays+for+the+internet%22

I think this is close but not exactly what he/she is looking for. A
better example would be "You (user 1) pay your isp (isp 1), who pays
their isp (isp 2). Depending on where the traffic goes, isp 2 will
route its traffic to a backbone internet provider (isp 3) and pay
money to them, or will route the traffic to a smaller isp (isp 4) and
charge them money. If sent to the backbone, isp 3 sends its data to
isp 4 and isp 4 charges isp 3 money. The place you are downloading
your information from (server 1) gets its internet connection from isp
4, which it pays money usually based on the total amount of data
transferred.

Thus, the backbone isp (isp 3) typically gets paid for most of the
traffic sent over the internet, but the isps most users use (isp's 1,
2, and 4), charge more than the backbones for each gig transferred,
and thus are able to make money. In the grand scheme of things, users
are charged a flat monthly fee from their isp (isp 1), and the website
or other service (server 1) pays a specific amount either for a
specific speed internet connection or for each gigabyte of data
transferred. Server 1 is charged a lot more for its internet access
than user 1.

This is pretty much how that works.

im sorry. in the previous comment where i stated "If sent to the
backbone, isp 3 sends its data to
isp 4 and isp 4 charges isp 3 money.", it should read "If sent to the
backbone, isp 3 sends its data to
isp 4 and isp 3 charges isp 4 money.

Hi Funkywizard,

Yes I see what you mean. I was vaguely thinking along those lines also
when I went to think about this later. Thank you for your comment.

regards

rcd-ga

The comments from "funkywizard-ga" are more along the lines of what I
was looking for.  Thank you.