Carriers and Service Providers

A carrier is a company that provides the infrastucture such as cables and switches (as well as services) that allows the connectivuty between two or more systems for the purpose of communications. Examples in Australia include Telstra and Optus.

A service provider is a company that (usually) provides a communications service. Generally, it refers to an Internet Service Provider. This company provides internet services to custermoers to include WWW, Email, FTP, Gopher etc via a dial up line of ISDN line. Companies in Australia include iinet Limited, Westnet, Telstra and Dodo

Author Mike Leishman