Choosing an Interface

You can chose from among three interfaces to get information and handle transactions. The User Interface menu lets you make the choice. (See

• The Desktop interface allows you to purchase 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. through a series of user-selectable windows. Your 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. is brought to your PC and bids on your behalf from there. On the desktop, monitoring features let you watch the Merkato auction in real time.
• The Express interface lets you get status information from—and send configuration information to—an agent in the garage A server from which buyer and seller agents can bid when they are not actively bidding on a user's PC desktop. The garage is generally installed on the Merkato server, providing maximum performance and reliability. . The Express interface is at the top of the Portal The unique market mechanism by which Merkato allocates bandwidth to potential buyers at an optimal market price The price for something that buyers and sellers agree on. Merkato establishes a market price for bandwidth during each spot market 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. . 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 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. 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. page when you log in. The Express interface is considered advanced because the fields are less interactive, less annotated, and less graphical than the Java-based Merkato Desktop The Merkato desktop is the first window that appears when the user begins to bring the Merkato buyer or seller agent to their desktop. It lets users specify which Merkato agent or agents they want to download to the desktop. interface. Note that the Express interface does not support creation or cancellation of reservations.
• The Wizard In Merkato, an automated series of inquiry screens that walks you through the process of creating and configuring a buyer agent.interface walks you through the steps for setting up your Merkato agent to obtain bandwidth through the 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.. The settings are automatically transferred to your agent. Changes made through the Wizard are applied to both the Desktop and Express agents. You can later change the settings from the agent interfaces, or return to the Wizard and make changes there.

When you first log in, the Express interface appears in the browser window.

We recommended that you start with the Wizard interface to make basic buying choices. When you become more advanced in your use of Merkato you can make further changes on the Desktop interface. The Desktop interface also gives you the most detailed status information. As you become more proficient with Merkato, you may want to use the Express interface to make quick configuration changes and status checks without downloading your agent to your PC.