Choice of Interface

You can choose from among interfaces to set preferences, get information, and handle transactions. The User Interface menu gives you three choices.

• The Wizard In Merkato, an automated series of inquiry screens that walks you through the process of creating and configuring a buyer agent.walks you through the steps for setting up your Merkato 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. to obtain 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.. The settings are automatically transferred to your agent and can be viewed and altered from either the Desktop or Express interfaces.
• The Desktop interface allows you to purchase bandwidth through a series of user-selectable windows. Your agent is brought to your PC and bids on your behalf from there.
• The Express interface lets you obtain 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 displayed on 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 upon successful login. The fields on the Express interface are less interactive than the Java-based Merkato Desktop interface.

When you first log in, the Express interface appears.

We recommended that, when you start using Merkato, you select the Wizard first to make basic buying choices. When you become more advanced in your use of Merkato you can make further changes to 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.