Portal

The portal The unique market mechanism by which Merkato allocates bandwidth to potential buyers at an optimal market price. An auction is established, where each bid consists of a unit price and the quantity desired at that price. Bidders are ranked according to the unit price they offer. Bidders who get an allocation pay the unit price offered by the lowest accepted bidder. (This is the "second price" aspect of the auction.) Bidders who don't get an allocation can re-bid at a higher unit price, in an attempt to improve their ranking in the auction. (This is the "progressive" aspect of the auction.) An auction round closes when all bidders are either successful, based on their last bid, or cannot match the price offered by the current lowest successful bidder. is the entry point to gain access to the agent The program that interacts with the rest of Merkato on behalf of buyers and sellers. Buyers can acquire bandwidth by configuring their agents to offer the price they are willing to pay for a range of available quantity, or use their agent to request a quote for a fixed-price bandwidth reservation. Sellers configure their agents with a quantity of bandwidth for sale and a minimum price they are willing to accept for that quantity. applications, as well as to obtain historical allocation An amount of bandwidth available for your use. Depending on the type of service being offered through Merkato, this can represent the maximum bandwidth available to you or a minimum guarantee of bandwidth available to you. and billing information. When you select the Streaming Hand web site, the opening screen looks similar to the one below.

If you enter a valid username and password, and click Login, the top-level agent screen appears:

The central portion of the window shows the Merkato Agent. This is the express agent interface. Below this area, if you scroll down, are the agent status screens, indicating recent allocations and market price.

To the right, the pull-down user interface menu allows you to select the Wizard In Merkato, an automated series of inquiry screens that walks you through the process of creating and configuring a buyer agent., Express, or Desktop interface.

The left portion of the page contains a navigation bar, which provides access to all pages of the portal:

• Agent – (The page shown) contains the Express agent interface, the user interface selection pull-down, the allocation table, and market price The price for something that buyers and sellers agree on. Merkato establishes a market price for bandwidth during each spot market The Merkato mechanism by which bandwidth is traded, in a progressive second price auction. An optimal fair market price is established and bandwidth is allocated to buyers, based on their bids relative to other buyers. auction round. There is a fixed amount for sale, so as demand increases, prices rise. The market price is reached when the cumulative demand of all the buyers is exactly equal to the amount of bandwidth being offered by the seller. graphs.
• Traffic – Contains Monthly, Weekly, and Daily graphs of traffic associated with this user.
• Charge Reports – Opens an interface that allows you to create queries into the Merkato database. Using these tools you can determine the ongoing cost of your bandwidth The amount of data transmitted or received per unit of time. When we refer to acquiring or selling bandwidth, we mean the amount of information that can be sent over a connection at one time, at the allowed speed, without packet loss or excessive delay. Bandwidth is measured in bits-per-second. allocations.
• Transaction Data – Opens a billing interface that allows you to create queries into the Merkato database, providing a history of transactions for your account. The data is downloaded as a spreadsheet file.
• Version Information – For the Merkato and the database it uses, provides the version, build date, and installation date. Use this information to determine what version of Merkato you are using.

• Logout – Returns user to login screen.