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YOUR PC NEEDS A PHONE COMPANY TOO!!!!
Much like you need to call up the local phone company if you want a "wired" telephone connection, or call up your local wireless provider if you want a "wireless" connection (speaking of telephony here, not "wifi"), you must call up your local "Internet Service Provider (ISP)" if you want to get a connection to the Internet. There is just no way around it, unless you are an ISP yourself. The ISP arranges with a "Global Service Provider (GSP)" in order to get a connection to the Internet. The GSPs are much like Long Distance Telephone Providers are to telephone customers. ISP customers rarely get to choose GSPs, like they get to choose Long Distance Providers, however. The ISP has already chosen it for them.
Unlike the normal case with local phone companies, where there is typically one or maybe two, called "Local Exchange Carriers (LECs)," there tend to be many ISPs in the larger areas. Almost anybody can, and has been in the ISP business over the past 10 years. The ones that you are familiar with are firms like ATT, AOL, MSN, Earthlink, NetZero. These happen to be ISPs that have "Points of Presence (POPs) in almost all cities in the US, except the smaller ones. If the ISP has a POP in your town, this means that you do not have to dial long distance in order to reach the POP in some neighboring town. If your town does not have a POP for one of these large ISPs, chances are it has a small Mom and Pop ISP. Look in your local yellow pages for Internet service.
"Regional ISPs" are ISPs which do not have a national presence, such as the regional phone companies, Bellsouth, Verizon, SBC, Qwest. They do have a "regional" presence, so they are much bigger than the mom and pop ISP.
It is important to understand these distinctions when you travel. You cannot get to the regional ISP BellSouth from the middle of Kansas, except by a long distance call, or an 800 number call. The national ISPs generally have local access numbers in all the major metro areas of the US, except of course NOT in all the small towns in the middle of Kansas....... Nothing is easy is it?