When asking some questions online, like, “why can’t I browse the internet?” or “my internet speed is slow” or maybe questions like, “how does my browsing get restricted when my subscription is up?”; you are prone to get responses like “it could be your ISP restricting your internet access”.
Table Of Contents
So, we’ll be learning as much stuff as I can write down on
the Subject – ISP.
What is an ISP?
ISP is actually an acronym meaning ‘Internet Service
Provider’ which in the simplest term I can come up with, means a company that
provides you and I access to the internet as long as we are their customers –
patronize them.
If it’s still hard to understand, I’ll break it down
further. ISPs are basically the companies that give you sim cards which you use
for calling and of course, browsing.
There are a lot of ISPs all around the world and they vary
based on your location (country). Africans are familiar with their own ISPs
like MTN, Airtel, Safricom, Cell c, Vodafone, among many others. While those in
the USA have AT&T, Verizon e.t.c.
HOW DO ISPs INTERFERE WITH YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION?
I mean, it is quite simple to understand. Since these ISPs
give us the access to the internet, then it is only logical that they also are
capable to stop you from accessing the internet.
ISPs don’t own the internet, they’re more like a gateway
that connects you to the internet-only, they charge you for access. If you for
some reason refuse to pay for said access, gates closed. This is one way an ISP
interferes with your internet access.
Slow browsing speed is sometimes another interference caused
by an ISP. Let’s say you’ve paid for internet access but for some unforeseen
reason, your internet speed is slow; people sometimes blame the weather for
such problems, but what if the weather’s great and you’ve got enough data to
browse the internet, but same problem occurs. Your ISP could be the reason
you’re forced to browse so slow, how? You may ask; Servers! Out of many other
reasons an ISP causes slow internet speed, bad servers are a major reason. If
for some reason your ISP does not check or maintain their servers regularly,
you are determined, destined and I dare say doomed to suffer slow internet
speed all day or even for weeks.
One painful way an ISP interferes with your internet
connection is when they deliberately do not allow their customers to exceed a
certain bandwidth of data usage daily, I mean you paid for this access fair and
square and still they give you a daily bandwidth. They sometimes do this in
order not to overload their servers and maybe to reduce internet traffic.
Have you tried accessing a website but are restricted, it
could maybe your government does not want its citizens to access these
websites; but how does the government restrict your access? ISPs. The
government owns virtually everything in a country including your internet
service providers, so if a mandate is made by the government refusing you access
to a particular site, then it’s the judge of all ISPs in the country to
restrict your access to these websites. I’ll try to explain further; your ISP
is a gateway to the internet, if you pass through this gateway and find an area
blocked, you have no right to pass through that area, if you try to pass
through, you’d get harassed by the security officers.
Although, there are ways to bypass these restrictions, the
most common being the use of VPNs; that’s a whole other article on its own.
CAN YOU CREATE YOUR PERSONAL ISP?
I mean, wouldn’t it be great being your own internet
provider? It would, but unfortunately that would be very difficult to
accomplish.
The good thing about this idea of creating your own ISP is, it
is not impossible. It is very much possible to create your own ISP just as easy
as it is for you to have your own spaceship or create a full feature film all
by yourself. All these are not impossible but, it virtually impossible; and the
main factor of this impossibility is money, it will cost you a lot of money to
create or become your own internet provider. Also the fact that this cannot be
done by one person no matter how skilled said person is, becomes another factor
that makes creating your own ISP virtually impossible.
I wish I could explain further why creating your own ISP
will be worrisome but, I only know so much and I’m trying to just give you a
straight to the point summary of things.