The Recent 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. table, shown below, appears below 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. panel in the Merkato 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 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. .
For sellers, the Recent Allocation table indicates reservations and allocations made to buyers of the 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. you have offered. Confirmed reservations are at the top, followed by the most recent 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. allocations. Each Spot market allocation entry contains a summary of information for an hour, which generally includes many auction rounds.
Allocations are shown in order; most recent at the top. The columns are as follows:
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Start Time |
The start date and time for this allocation |
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End Time |
The end date and time for this allocation |
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Resource The bandwidth service that is offered through a single Merkato marketplace. It will have service attributes, an available quantity earmarked for it by the NSP, and a market mechanism for distributing bandwidth (either the spot market or reservation market The Merkato market mechanism by which a specified quantity of bandwidth, for a specific duration, is sold for a firm price specified by the seller and agreed to by the buyer. This is an automated process based on a rate sheet that the seller establishes in advance. ). |
The name of the bandwidth product allocated |
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Buyer |
The Buyer agent that won the allocation |
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Seller |
The Seller agent that sold the allocation |
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Quantity ( Mbps One of the ways of expressing units of bandwidth-Megabits-per-second (1,000,000 bits-per-second). ) |
The bandwidth quantity for this allocation (for Spot market allocations, the average quantity obtained over the time period indicated) |
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Price ($/month/Mbps) |
The unit price for this allocation (for Spot market allocations, the average price obtained over the time period indicated) |
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Cost ($) |
The bottom-line cost for this allocation (for Spot market allocations, the average cost over the time period indicated) |