Is anyone working on a way to by pass ISP's?

[tfrost2002]

With all the expertise out there and all the knowledge, is anyone working on a solution to the ISP problem? The internet is being controlled by the ISP's and world governments. I have read the usual drivel about the cost of equipment, the need to buy bandwidth. Where did the bandwidth sellers get the right to sell bandwidth? Don't we all have bandwidth? I am not an expert but some of you out there are. Can't you find a way for us to connect directly to the internet without going through some sort of control point? The internet should not be subject to government or corporate control. My understanding is that it was a collection of computers sharing information not some commercial venture with another way for corporate and government interests to control the masses. Please take this serious and don't give the usual simple answers. I am seriously looking to those of you who have the expertise to solve this issue. Are you trying?

 

[Philfreeze]

I am certainly not an expert but I can write what I know:
From your post I assume you mean a internet access provider right? ISP just means internet service provider, that is not very specific.

The ISP makes your connection to the internet possible by installing the cables to connect you. This gives them the right to control the bandwith. It is their cable and this means that they can say who can use how much of it.
There is not really a way to bypass this.

 

[bill001g]

You can bypass the ISP. You just need to run your own fiber to all the peoples houses you wish to talk to. So you and all your friends can talk but you get another group of friends who did the same thing in their city and connected their houses. You agree that you will split the cost to have a fiber run between your group of houses and the other group of houses. Now you just keep adding these agreements to connect networks together and you have the internet.

The internet is actually just these agreement to interconnect all these networks.

Lets say you and a neighbor run a fiber between each other and call yourself a ISP. Now a different friend and his neighbor in another country to the same thing. So both have very low costs. But now you want to connect your network to his. So you go and get a quote to run undersea fiber for a couple hundred million dollars and pay a million dollars a month for lease costs to run the fiber over other people land. You are very rich so you have it put in.

Now 2 other guys down the street in both countries setup their own isp but don't have the money to buy their own undersea fiber. So they can just run fiber over to your house and use your connection to the other country.......it is free right.

 

[techgeek]

The issue is that the internet isn't made up of individual computers that are connected. It's what's connects each computer. You own (or if you rent, the landlord owns) what's inside your building / home / whatever. Beyond that, the lines that connect to your home back to the switching office of whatever service provider you have is not owned by you. So if you are using DSL, your copper line / fiber optic cable that runs to your house is owned by your telephone company who is also likely to be your ISP. Same goes for cable companies. This cable runs back to their switching building. All the equipment is owned and maintained by your ISP (or is leased by your ISP from the owner). This switching office then ties into your ISP's network backbone, which is then connected to the lines that make up the internet backbone. The internet backbone is owned and maintained by the large telecoms / cable companies. All of this infrastructure costs money to build / expand / maintain / upgrade / etc. No one company owns all of the internet backbone. Just in the US, it's made up of a few large companies. Your ISP has to pay to access it, if they aren't one of the owner of part of it. It's a very complex system.

The only way to access it directly would be to run your own lines to everyone's house, down to your own switching office. Then you would need your own local network backbone which you'd connect to the internet backbone. At this point you haven't bypassed your ISP, you've become an ISP, and you better be rich, because it's going to be expensive.

There is simply no way to bypass an ISP. If you are very technically minded (Network Design Engineer) and knew the in's and out's of your ISP's network, you "might" be able to hack your way through the ISP to the internet backbone. However they are pretty good at monitoring their own networks and would eventually discover the intrusion. And since you need some sort of hardline back to their office, it wouldn't take long for them to back track you to your location once they detected the intrusion.

What you are talking about is almost impossible, but definitely impractical. It sounds like you have a hate on for your ISP and ISP's in general. I don't necessarily blame you. However the internet is not like electricity. You can't just throw up a wind turbine / solar panels and take yourself off the power grid. The internet is a global cooperative of networks.

 

[jsmithepa]

Free music! Free downloads! Free Internet! What are you communist?

Seriously, the backbone does belong to the government and our tax money, but as soon as you require a connection to your home, that's the vendor's infrastructure.

Free Internet is not sustainable but I wish there was more competition and government oversight. Overseas Internet shame us.