In fact, everything is simple - if you abstract from the radio signal fiber and so on, all the computers that are connected to the Internet have a connection between them - there are computers one in the US, the other is at home and both are connected to the Internet, you can imagine that they are connected with a long cable (this for simplicity).
How do network devices see each other ?! Each computer on the network must have an ip address, while the network should not have the same address, otherwise the other participants in the network will not know who to contact and a conflict will occur.
What does it look like ?! Ip address is 192.168.1.1 for example (ip version 4), - the maximum value of addresses is 255.255.255.254, the minimum is 0.0.0.1 - I will not go into the subtleties of counting, but if you count all the available ip addresses, it turns out that there are about 16 million unique ip addresses if I am not mistaken.
Hence the problem that the devices (smart phone computers, tablets, etc.) on the global network are clearly more than 16 million.
How then does it all work ?! There are the first 16 million computers connected to each other in one local network, we will ship this network L1, there are another 16 million computers connected to each other (L2). How to combine these two networks in networks L1 and L2 should have at least one computer with 2 network cards connected to each other, respectively, these network cards can have their ip addresses since these two computers form the network L3 (although there are only two computers ). And if everything is properly configured - that is, there is a routing computer from the L1 network can transfer data to computers in the L2 network through the L3 network, and it will turn out that 32 million computers are connected to the network. But computers with 2 network cards can be much more than one, and each network needs to be routed and so on ...
Actually, the provider takes money for what - there is a range of ip addresses allocated to each country from the first 16 million, then federal providers scale the network to smaller providers that scale to sit down to users, and so one way or another everything is connected by wire, and the provider takes money in fact not for Internet and for servicing these wires, laying new repair of old + server equipment that routes this whole farm, switches and much more + costs for electricity and staff salaries that all this ate maintained in operable condition.
Why is the cost different for internet speed ?! everything is simple - the cable capacity is limited physically - that is, a gigabit cable will not miss more than this gigabit and everyone here has a lot of cable users - respectively, this cable has to be shared between users, and the one who has paid more has less to share with others =)
All of the above is written very conditionally, on the fingers, for schoolchildren, but the main thing seems to me the principle of work immediately becomes clear.