Is there a difference between a local ISP and a residential ISP?

Answer 1

An ISP (internet Service Provider) allows a home, business or just a person to connect to the internet. There are many ISP's nationwide (or worldwide).

A local ISP is often franchised to exclusively provides internet access to a designated area via some sort of wire cable, fiber optic cable or telephone service. A other non-local ISPs can also provide services via radio transmission (satellite dish), telephone dialup, or leasing/buying service or bandwidth from a local ISP.

A Residential ISP provides internet services suitable to homes and residences. Since home services usually involves mostly non-critical retrieving or downloading information from the internet, this service may offer but not guarantee high download speeds and may have some restrictions such as limiting outgoing bandwidth (speed), sharing bandwidth among multiple residences, and a single dynamically assigned internet address.

Business internet service is critical for running a business. It is supposed to offer more reliable level of service, guaranteed higher speeds in both directions (so that others may download/retrieve information from the business), one or more fixed internet addresses to better support multiple company computers and business services such as web browser services, sales, fax and email services. I most cases, it is substantially more expensive then residential service.