Currently there isn't much of a bandwidth market, not like other commodities. Do you think a bandwidth market would make internet access cheaper, more open and more available ?

@cjd currently, there isn't distance market. Do you think distance market would make travel cheaper, more open, and more available?

@cjd IOW, what do you mean by bandwidth market?

@wolf480pl Run a cable between point A and point B and you can immediately sell rights to the bandwidth in that cable and people trade them like corn futures.

@cjd so you can sell the service of transfering N bytes of data from point A to point B, right?

@wolf480pl
Network links are bounded in capacity and people care about latency so it makes more sense to buy a # of kbps of guaranteed bandwidth between point A and point B over a given period of time.

@cjd ok, so you rent some kbps of bandwidth from point A to point B for a certain period of time?

@wolf480pl
Yes, because your example of selling the service of transferring N bytes of data could, if latency was undefined, by filled by harddrives in the mail. Or if latency was defined then the customer could submit all of the data at once causing the provider to fail the contract.

@cjd ok, but that'd only work on the wholesale market, right? A customer would prefer to pay a flat fee to get bandwidth from A to "The Whole Internet"