peering, derivatives, and big brother

Thu Dec 16 03:24:25 UTC 2010

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 at inconcepts.biz>
Sr Network Operator  /  Innovative Network Concepts

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 2:52 PM, Ryan Finnesey
<ryan.finnesey at 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 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
>