Eric, you ask: What is an ISP? Does outsourcing preclude one from being an ISP?
I've got to be careful here, so hang in there with me.
Like Compuserve and Prodigy, and a few other early providers, AOL was for many years considered an On Line Service Provider, or OLSP, until they one-by-one, and now collectively, engaged in the practice of providing gateway access to the 'net. Collectively, these organizations were also known as enhanced service providers, in some contexts.
Previously, the 'net, the predecessor to what we know today to be the Internet, was strictly for educational (university) and research (the war machine), for the most part. [I'm not trivializing it here, just keeping it brief.]
[[Begin Sidebar: During those earlier years, when the 'net was still primarily edu and research oriented, the OLSPs were a separate means for many users to conduct their business and liesure communications activities in an Internet-like manner, using a shared cloud resource employing packet technologies like X.25, and eventually, TCP/IP. In fact, some of the original players used X.25 prior to TCP/IP, and still do to this day in certain parts of the world.
It was either use the OLSP, or an X.25 value-added network (VAN) provider, if you wanted to economize on usage costs, OR, create some other means of point-to-point dedicated dialup session, using ISDN, or an asynchronous modem link by one of many other proprietary means. Private lines were also used more extensively prior to VANs and the 'net, and breakeven cost analyses between PL and dialup would dictate which one to use. End Sidebar]]
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An ISP is an organization that directly sells and provisions to its customers access to the Internet. It makes provisions for points of access, a.k.a., points of presence, or POPs, and connects those POPs via dedicated (sometimes shared) edge paths to the Internet's core. It must also contract with backbone providers to ensure that its users can access the network core and beyond, while also providing overall network management and administration on their subscribers' behalf. Any part of these resources and provisions may be outsourced.
An ISP will most often also provide email utility, directory services, and a host of other specialized functions associated with web hosting (disc space, server hosting, facilities management, etc.) for their subscribers' own use.
Today, differentiation is so broad in this space that I would stop there, and note only that ISPs are adding more services all the time, including voice, data mining, fax, image retrieval, streaming video, etc., which, I suppose, elevates <?> them to some other category du jour, as the marketecture of the moment will allow.
The role of an ISP, in its purest form, is clearly different from the role of a Backbone Provider. The BB provider's primary role is (in an ascending order) to aggregate the traffic flows from many disparate ISPs, converging them into common network flows into network access points (NAPs) where nodal peering and hand offs take place among individual streams, and routes are established to destination targets, as the process reverses itself (in descending order). If my memory is correct, AOL used ANS as its primary backbone provider for quite some time. Not sure if they still do, or, if in fact they own them now...(someone correct this if it is dated information).
Some organizations who are primarily ISPs also have some part of their business which is backbone-provider related, and some companies who are primarily backbone providers may also have some ISP-related business.
Many of the original large Internet Companies, who did both SPing and BBing, have since shed their residential loads to others, while retaining their enterprise business customers.
You stated that AOL doesn't own or lease any physical hardware, but that is incorrect. They do. Do you recall their $300,000,000 upgrade last year that went to alleviating the busy tone conditions their customers were encountering? That amount went towards hardware, software and additional route capacity.
An ISP may also outsource some of their dialup operations to others, but that's okay.. it doesn't make them any more or less an ISP for doing so. The primary criterion, in this day and age of outsourcing just about everything imaginable, is their relationship with their subscribers. If it's a one-on-one commitment, then AOL is their ISP, despite whomever may be doing agency or proxy work on their behalf.
Comments and corrections welcome.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
