Home > Common carrier

Traditionally common carrier means a business that transports people or physical goods. In the 20th century, the term came to refer also to utilities (those transporting some service such as communications or public utilities).

A property common carrier is an organization (often a commercial or private business but sometimes a government agency) that provides transportation of persons or goods, often over a definite route according to a regular schedule, making its services available to all who choose to employ them. Airlines, railroads, bus line s, cruise ships and trucking companies are examples of property common carriers.

Common carriers generally exist under a different regulatory regime than specialised carriers, are subject to different laws, and sometimes to different treatment in other ways (e.g. taxation). For example, common carriers generally explicitly have no legal liability for the contents of freight shipped through them unless the customer has purchased excess insurance for that purpose.

A public utility is an organization that holds itself out to the public for hire to provide utility services, such as communication by radio like cellular telephone and satelliteFor other uses, please see Satellite (disambiguation A satellite is an object that orbits another object (known as its primary . The term is often used to describe an artificial satellite (as opposed to natural satellites, or moons). Because all objects e television; telecommunicationTelecommunication is the extension of communication over a distance. In practice it also recognizes that something may be lost in the process; hence the term 'telecommunication' covers all forms of distance and/or conversion of the original communications by wire such as telephoneThe telephone or phone is a telecommunications device that transmits speech by means of electric signals. Generally attributed to the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, the first was built in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1876. However, an Italian inventor Anton, cable tv and the InternetThis article is about the Internet the extensive, worldwide computer network available to the public. An internet is a more general term for a set of interconnected computer networks that are connected by internetworking''. WWW information network structu; transmissionIn communications, transmission is the act of transmitting electrical messages (and the associated phenonomena of radiant energy that pass through media). In telecommunication, the term transmission has the following meanings: 1. The dispatching, for rece by physical connection of supplies such as electricityElectricity is a property of certain subatomic particles, such as electrons and protons, that gives rise to attractive and repulsive forces between them. It is one of the four fundamental forces of nature, and is a conserved property of matter that can be, natural gas, water and sewer services, etc.

With the deregulation of public utilities it may also be used in relation to a common carrier company that provides the final transmission link to consumers' homes or businesses, but consumers can buy their gas or electricity from any of a number of supplier companies, all of whom feed power into the common transmission line (see electricity retailing).