Ray, of course you are correct, since "pooling," itself, has gained the status of a euph for "peering."
The traders have adopted the term "pooling" in order to differentiate themselves from ISPs and Internet Backbone Providers, who call their practice peering. The traders' "stuff" flows at Layers 1 and 2, consisting of an assortment of protocols and services that would not be found in their native state at ISP peering sites, per se. These include pure SONET capacity, pure ATM clouds, Frame Relay, PSTN/GSTN voice minutes, and a growing component of VoIP that can be carted without much ado. But VoIP, or even IP, instead of being the core protocol, is only incidental to the trading of a purer approach to "capacity" handling, without much or any concern for the usual filtering and forwarding considerations that b-b providers and ISPs would be concerned with. Poolling amounts to an intestinal plumbing job, in other words, as opposed to brain surgery that would serve to characterize routing decisions using IP. But one shouldn't be surprised to find the traders dealing at that level, too.
I suspect that the traders want to distinguish "their own" form of bandwidth aggregation and distribution from that which the ISPs call peering at ISP NAPs, colos and other forms of hand offs. The ISP, in turn, is not only concerned with bandwidth, but also in the treatment of payloads through routing and other "services."
Your analogy to 25-yr IRU-dom vs spot requirements is valid, with some qualification, IMO. Large b-w users, if I might use that term now, usually require a staple of capacity for their own use that is at their disposal on a constant basis. Spot purchases might be useful, however, even to the largest users - and service providers - to supplement their regular "supplies," ad hoc, as one would use temporary help to augment their regular staff during vacations or during other periods of heightened demand. But here, IMO, the proportion of secondary (spot) bandwidth is diminished, comparatively, with increases in the base supply.
Some of what is being called "trading" is nothing more than a new way of distributing bandwidth at wholesale and even retail levels, for use on a permanent (three to five year, for example) basis. Take bandwidth.com and others who have come about in this class, recently, for example. While they "do" support what can arguably be called "trading", they also serve an agent for securing long term bandwidth, as an alternative to dealing with a carrier directly. Here, they either serve as the broker to a long-term bandwidth acquisition deal, or as a reseller, depending on the dictates of the circumstances.
In other instances, when an enterprise or even a fledgling service provider doesn't have the ongoing means to mount a sustained amount of bandwidth in their "own" supply, they might use trading to grow the business, until such time as they can afford to lease/purchase an IRU, or place their own facilities in the ground, as in the case of a service provider.
Price elasticity on a non-constant curve, however, serves to obfuscate these decisions, therefore making spot purchasing appear to be the safer bet for all but the most endowed carriers, who, themselves, when they come up against a supply crunch, will also engage in fiber swaps and futures trading.
But in this last case, there is nothing really new about trading, because the carriers have been doing this for eons without the aid of the energy companies. I recall when Teleport made their first foray into New Jersey in 1985. Within the first six months of their presence in the state, they had already swapped several strands, or so many fiber miles, with NJ Bell, who at the time was one of their most ardent opposers to their very being.
The reasons for the swap were purely economic in nature, since Teleport had placed a route where NJB's requirements were sparse, but where they needed to get to, nonetheless. A swap did the trick, and served to allow Teleport to get to some of their own out-of-the-way places without having to pull. This little account may seem quaint by today's standards of fiber abundance, but it serves to demonstrate some of the nuances and dynamics behind why and how some "bandwidth" deals are still being negotiated, to this day. Only the scale has changed.
Which all serves to point back to the dependence on relationships between the top tiered players, and every tier down the totem pole, as barriers to doing business that the new energy traders must overcome. Or, leverage, if they can get their collective feet in the door. |
