Re: peering, derivatives, and big brother

[Laurent GUERBY <laurent () guerby net>]

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