Carrier
termISP & telecomnetworking
An operator that moves somebody else's traffic: the physical substrate everything above it assumes.
Enterprise networking treats the carrier as a line on a diagram, which is why carrier problems are so disorienting when they arrive - the abstraction was doing a great deal of work. Underneath it are rights of way, conduit, undersea cable, regulated interconnection and a completely different commercial clock: circuits are provisioned in weeks, not minutes. Several of the oldest entries in this field's history are really about who was permitted to lay cable where, which is a legal question that determined a technical topology.
Also known as: telco, operator, service provider, telecommunications operator