peering, derivatives, and big brother

Wed Dec 15 19:52:37 UTC 2010

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 at guerby.net] 
Sent: Monday, December 13, 2010 3:07 PM
To: George Bonser
Cc: nanog at 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