What does an internet servuce provider do (ie technically speaking)?
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I feel like a lot of the explanations here are poor because they fail to explain what ISPs do in (a lot of) countries where ISPs just rent the last mile infrastructure from the state/another company.
Pretty key part of being an ISP is peering. That is, negotiating agreements with other internet providers to interconnect their networks.
Broadly this comes in two categories. The (normally cheaper/free) case is simply exchanging your own data with each other. I.e. an ISP peers with Google or Netflix or maybe a bunch of networks via a hub, and they agree to share connectivity to each other. The more expensive one is that the ISP may need to pay another network to get access to not only that network, but the rest of the internet via it. Ideally you offload as much traffic as possible via the former, then whatever’s left via the latter.
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