How does it work?

The servers required all depends on the services that you want to provide. The major services are Newsgroups, E-Mail, Web Hosting, etc...

How an ISP works is generically like so:
The ISP has a dedicated pipe to the internet with a reserved number of IP addresses. You then provide equipment for your end-users to connect to you (via dial-in/wireless/etc.).

Check out this link
http://www.amazing.com/internet/advice.html
to help understand everything associated with an ISP.

You must understand that your question is very broad, as an ISP can be set up with all different types of equipment.

Hope this helps you.

An ISP has the following:

A high speed connection to the "backbone" of the internet. At least a T1 line.

A mail server.

A modem bank connected to the phone lines that users dial in on.

A web page server if the ISP hosts web pages.

A router to interconnect the mail and web servers to the modem bank and the T1 line.

Backup power.

Data backups for the mail and web servers.

Chas

An ISP works like this

he is connected via some Frame Relay to other Networks. The Providers main job is to ROUTE you through the internet.

Setup ISP

One with many interfaces (subinterfaces) or more Routers for routing costumers. An interface in a router holds an static IP address for each interface - subinterface for each line the ISP then link them to the bigger router on some other ISP's this could seem like a lot of interface's and that's why a lot of them manufactors of the routers created something called a subinterface. Subinterfaces is a virtual interface underlying the real interfaces and they are also intitle to hold an IP Address. in the old days of the interface there where very large routers out there and many of them to be able to contain all these interfaces and the ROUTING tables where enourmous and the routing time slow. Therefore the big Router vendors created ROUTE summarization
this means that you take all your IP addresses within an address range example IP address
62.65.45.12 + 62.65.45.16 + 62.65.45.20 and find the equalized subnet for all them addresses 255.255.255.0 and route them all through interface eth0 this will save the time in the routing engine since the packet are (forwarded faster) the normal way a router works without route summarization everytime a router receive a packet it looks in the routing table to see where to send the packet, but when doing the summarization then it will forward the packets much faster.

Fallover: the ISP has of course more than one router and they could set them up with different scenarios (Hot Standby) or the better and more effecient use is Load Balancing where the ISP can balance the traffic comming from different IP address ranges, once a session is started from remote host (router) that session goes roughly the whole session through the same gateway. (router).

Users Line: The comment thing for an ISP is to offer a range of getting services (Broadband XDSL

Hello,

An ISP (Internet Service Provider) is any company that provides internet service such as Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc. In order to become on you need first you need to get the proper technology, example: DHCP Server, DNS Server and many other things. In addition you will need to purchase your service for example you may have an T3 line that uses an class B ip address, than you will need to configure that with your DHCP or DNS to determine the amount of ip you can have and that amount will tell you approximately the amount of accounts that you can lease. If I keep writting we be here tomorrow, so my advise is forget it. Any further question go to www.google.com and search ISP.

To become an ISP takes a lot of work and dedication, and on top of that the competition is killing. So if you thinking of that forget it.