The Bandwidth Traders

Ten years ago Enron had the bright idea of trading bandwidth, as if it was a commodity like gold.

The proposition was crazy, of course, and the idea was buried along with the company. Now, though, we’re starting to see similar ideas emerge.

Last year, fresh from a successful sales career at Cable & Wireless, Carl Gough started Mobsource. The idea was straight forward; lots of carriers have excess capacity, they contribute it to a ‘dark pool of bandwidth’, which Mobsource sells on to customers at below-market rates. In the next phase he hopes to turn it into a real-time trading platform, where the price of bandwidth can change by the minute based on what the market determines.

As you’ll hear on this week’s CrossTalk podcast, Geoff Huston, Chief Scientist at APNIC isn’t convinced. He describes it as ‘one of these marginal ideas that emerges when times are good’. He says difficulties emerge when routing IP traffic because TCP is not a path protocol. You can build a dedicated VPN, but t