Invisible Hand Networks was really meant to be a spot market. The same problem exists with bandwidth spot markets that always has existed, the cost of ports to maintain sufficient capacity to the exchange, and the lack of critical mass, meaning that the spot bandwidth is either pretty expensive, or there is not enough capacity for any serious application. Certainly, no spot bandwidth market currently in existence can compete with even mid-sized CDNs; and I do not believe that will ever change. The IHN folks were also disadvantaged because they seemed to know a lot about economics, but basically nothing about networks. So their technology was neat from a reporting perspective, but the actual functioning their exchange fabric was/is a disaster. I do not know if they are still in business or if they are still constrained by the flawed design they had in place several years ago. -- Jeff S Wheeler <jsw@inconcepts.biz> Sr Network Operator / Innovative Network Concepts On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 2:52 PM, Ryan Finnesey <ryan.finnesey@harrierinvestments.com> wrote:
I remember 5 years ago a company called Invisible Hand Networks that tried something like that.
Cheers Ryan
-----Original Message----- From: Laurent GUERBY [mailto:laurent@guerby.net] Sent: Monday, December 13, 2010 3:07 PM To: George Bonser Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: peering, derivatives, and big brother
On Sun, 2010-12-12 at 19:36 -0800, George Bonser wrote:
(...) The financial derivatives market isn't, in my opinion, a good analogy of the peering market. A data packet is "perishable" and must
be moved quickly. The destination network wants the packet in order to keep their customer happy and the originating network wants to get it to that customer as quickly and cheaply as possible. The proliferation of these peering points means that today there is more traffic going directly from content network to eyeball network. To use a different analogy, it is almost like the market is going to a series of farmer's markets rather than supermarkets in the distribution channel. Sure, there are still the "supermarkets" out there, but increasingly they are selling their "store brand" by becoming content hosting networks themselves. (...)
Hi,
The electricity spot market is close to your definition of "perishable":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_market
It has a derivative market, google for "electricity derivatives" will give you some papers and models.
I'm pretty sure electricity and bandwidth share some patterns.
Now who wants to be the Enron of the bandwidth market? :)
Sincerely,
Laurent http://guerby.org/blog