London, UK based Band-x has created a new internet-based commodity trading exchange, that provides a market for communications bandwidth. The independent company was founded in July 1997, has four employees and has already signed up 300 customers who want to trade bandwidth or call time. So far it has no competitors and has projected that the exchange could grow to trade 10% of the wholesale bandwidth market which has an estimated value of $60,000m worldwide. Band-x charges a commission fee of between 2.25% and 0.05% of each transaction. Company Director Marcus de Ferranti, believes that the growth of the Internet and rapid de-regulation of the telecoms market, coupled to the relative ease of companies redirecting calls over other networks, through multi-carrier exchanges has enabled the start of bandwidth trading as a commodity. Current clients of the exchange, which merely matches buyer and seller bids, and provides contracts, are evenly split between communications carriers, resellers, and independent brokers. The contracts are either for blocks of call time over a period of around a month, or for raw bandwidth for internet or Virtual Private Network use. Band-x reckons that anyone will be able to sell on the exchange, especially large corporations which want to sell extra capacity on their Virtual Private Networks. Band-x is reluctant to add any extra features to its service as it wants to remain in a legislative loophole – by not offering to switch their customers over to other networks they avoid regulation by any of the telecommunications watchdog committees.
