Your first point of entry to the Merkato System is through 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., a web-based application that provides accounting and status information, as well as access to the Merkato agent The program that interacts with the rest of Merkato on behalf of buyers and sellers. Buyers can acquire 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. 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.. Your version of the portal may be slightly different than that the one below, but the functionality is the same.
Note: Merkato has been tested on Internet Explorer version 6.0 and later versions. While Merkato may work on other browsers, we have not verified this.
Enter a valid user name and password and click Login.
After you log in the Express agent screen appears, shown below.
From this top-level agent page you can get to the various screens that make up the portal, and to the desktop interface.