"Long Distance on the Internet" by Greg Newby "So," you're thinking, "how come I don't get charged more when I send email or access a Web site that is far away?" Good question. The answer is that the charging model we have all come to know and love from the telephone company doesn't work on the Internet. When you make a telephone call, you get billed by the minute depending on how far away you are calling. So, if you call across town your call may be free (or included in your monthly access charge) or only a few cents. Try to call across the state or across the country, though, and you'll be charged 10 or 20 cents, possibly more, for every minute you talk. On the Internet, you don't get charged for sending email messages or accessing Web sites at all. Instead, you get charged for your basic access to the Internet, or maybe billed by the hour. (There are a few Internet Service Providers, ISPs, who do charge for email messages or Web access -- notably CompuServe. However, they don't charge for how far away your message goes). This is really more like how you're used to buying cable television, where you get charged the same regardless of how much you watch. The best analogy, though, is how you use the US Postal Service to send a letter or parcel. With the USPS, you get charged by the weight of what you're sending, and nothing else usually matters. The same letter or package will get delivered anywhere in the country for the same amount! It's democracy in action! So where does the Internet fit in? The same method that ISPs use to bill you is how they pay for *their* Internet connection. The basic unit of Internet access is BANDWIDTH. (On the telephone, it's time and distance. For the USPS, it's weight.) When an ISP or some other business, school, or whatever gets connected to the Internet, they buy a certain quantify of bandwith, and are charged for that much bandwidth each month no matter how much they use. An ISP or business in our area might pay anywhere from several hundred to more than 10 thousand dollars per month, depending on how much bandwidth they buy (and on what other services are included, like network news access). Bandwidth doesn't have anything to do with the size of a marching band in a parade, of course (you already knew that, right?). What bandwidth is, is a measure of how much data can be transmitted in a given period of time. Businesses, schools, or ISPs might purchase bandwidth in quantities of 56Kbits per second (also known as "56K" -- that's 56,000 bits per second), 1.5Mbits per second (20 times faster, but only about twice the price), 45Mbits per second (20 times faster again -- 400 times faster than a 56K connection), or even more. Most ISPs and businesses are well-served by a 1.5Mbits connection, also known as a "T1." "But wait," you say. "What does that have to do with how I get to the Internet from home over a modem?" Well, we've discovered that ISPs, schools, businesses, etc. are connected to the Internet (24 hours per day!) at a particular bandwidth. An ISP (or school, or business, or public-access system like Prairienet) can set up a bank of modems for people to dial into with their modems. These modems let your computer use the ISP's network to be connected to the Internet for as long as your modem call lasts. The old scheme, that some ISPs still use, is to charge you according to the speed of your modem connection. But these days, most people have a 14.4Kbaud or 28.8Kbaud modem, so ISPs only charge or limit based on how long you're connected to their modems. What you get charged for is how many hours per month of your ISPs modem time you use. (By the way, "14.4Kbaud" is about the same as 14,400 bits per second. But modems, unlike a "real" Internet connection an ISP or business would have, can only send data in one direction at a time. Network geeks call modems "asynchroneous communication devices" since they can't send data synchroneously in two directions at once.) What does all this amount to? It makes sense for an ISP to charge by the hour for access to their modems (which then connect to the Internet). But the ISP doesn't pay any more or less if their network bandwidth is used all the time, or only used a little bit. Just like you get charged the same by the cable television company regardless of whether you watch it all day, or not at all. Since all the ISPs are interconnected (that's what the Internet is, after all: the world's largest network of interconnected networks), none of them need to worry about how far your email or Web browsing goes, or even about how big your messages are or how much data you're sending and retrieving. What will people think of next? If the Internet can be used to send any type of data with no charges for the amount of data or distance it's going, how about using the Internet like a telephone, to get around all those big bills from MCI and AT&T? This is a great idea, and you can buy several different Internet telephone products. "Whoa!" you're thinking, "aren't all those phone companies scared of this?" And what about cable television companies and Microsoft, that are getting involved in the Internet business. They probably would be more scared, except that it's the phone companies who want to SELL you your Internet access in the future, competing with the many small and medium ISPs of today.