Trading Desk: Exchanges Expand Coverage, Services

By Khali Henderson

Posted: 10/2000

Exchanges Expand Coverage, Services
By Khali Henderson

In a continuing effort to promote efficient trading of telecommunications capacity, several of the online trading exchanges have announced expansion of geographic coverage and support services for their respective members.

In late summer, Band-X Ltd.
(www.band-x.com), The Global TeleExchange (The
GTX, www.thegtx.com) and RateXchange Corp. (www.ratexchange.com) announced addition of new trading hubs. Band-X opened July 24 an office in Dublin to house its Band-X Ireland division, which will be led by CEO Jan Bosch, former eircom
(www.eircom.com) executive and director of the Irish Internet Association
(www.iia.ie).

A day later, The GTX activated exchange points on its Virtual Real-Time Exchange (VRTX) on two continents in Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Frankfurt, Germany; Los Angeles and Miami. These new locations are in addition to existing hubs in London and New York.

On July 31, RateXchange announced a deal with TeleCity
(www.telecity.co.uk), a neutral collocation service provider, wherein it will deploy its hubs in TeleCity’s European facilities. Currently TeleCity operates six Internet exchanges in Amsterdam; Edinburgh, Scotland; London; Manchester, England; and Stockholm, Sweden. Additional sites are being readied in Amsterdam and Frankfurt, and plans are made for sites in Dublin; Dusseldorf and Munich, Germany; and Paris.

Without deploying new hubs, the Asia Capacity Exchange Ltd. (ACE,
www.ace-asia.com) and the London Satellite Exchange (e-sax,
www.e-sax.com) have expanded their service areas through an agreement to cross-sell each other’s services. E-sax specializes in the exchange of satellite capacity, while ACE trades international communications capacity in the Asia-Pacific region. The two exchanges will cross-link their websites to provide each other’s services in a seamless fashion. At first, they will carry each other’s marketing information and telecom indices. Later, they intend to integrate their back-end trading mechanisms.

ACE also has announced that it will become a global clearinghouse for VoIP minutes for customers of gateway maker Nuera Communications Inc.
(www.nuera.com). Under the agreement, ACE will deploy Nuera’s Open, Reliable Communications Architecture
(ORCA) gateways in its TeleHubs in Hong Kong and Los Angeles. Additional hubs are planned for London; Miami; New York; Seoul, Korea; Singapore; and Tokyo. These platforms will be tied to the ACE Virtual Trading Floor, enabling
ORCA-equipped service providers to buy and sell capacity online. In addition, ACE will become a reseller of ORCA gateways.

RateXchange also announced a new service it was expected to have launched in mid-September. In August, it completed the beta trial on RateXmatch, an open platform that enables traders to manage their trades no matter the carrier, contract or exchange point used (see “RateXchange Sponsors Open Trading Platform,” page 86.

AIG Telecommunications LLC
(AIGT, www.aigtelecom.com) has upgraded the reporting mechanism for members of its minutes marketplace, making the information accessible via the web in real time. Previously, such reports were sent out by AIGT via e-mail or downloaded by the carrier from a file transfer program (FTP) site. The information is used to monitor traffic distribution and
QoS, manage ports, and reconcile billing among other functions. As the reporting system represents a standardized way in which carriers can monitor traffic usage and compare providers, it is spreading virally through the carrier community beyond AIGT’s own Central Marketplace membership, says AIGT managing director Eric
Raab.

Meanwhile, pioneer minutes exchange Arbinet-thexchange Inc. (www.arbinet.com) retooled and relaunched its service Aug. 10 with cutover of its new carrier-grade trading solution, which it deployed at its New York facility at 75 Broad Street. The deployment is the result of a yearlong effort in which it raised $75 million and refocused its efforts on its clearing services (to the neglect of its preannounced bandwidth trading venture) under the direction of chairman and CEO Anthony Craig. Craig turned over the baton, in part, in August to successor AT&T Corp.
(www.att.com) veteran J. Curt Hockemeier, who will be president and CEO. Craig remains as executive chairman.

The core component of thexchange’s Global Delivery Platform is a Nortel Networks Corp.
(www.nortelnetworks.com) DMS switch, which physically routes and delivers all traded traffic. Uniquely, the deployment is the first to automatically load the carrier switch with routing information generated from an online exchange engine, the company said in a press statement. Among a slew of vendors, thexchange is using trading software by Breakaway Solutions Inc.
(www.breakaway.com), QoS monitoring from ECtel Ltd.
(www.ectel.com) and local interconnection from FiberNet Telecom Group Inc.
(www.ftgx.com).

Chris Reid, Arbinet’s director of corporate communications, says the company has not abandoned its bandwidth trading plans, but merely postponed them to super-size its minutes exchange. The company appointed in late July Cavan Fabris to develop the company’s broadband trading business. Fabris previously was director of U.S. sales for the Carrier Services Division of Global TeleSystems Group Inc.
(www.gtsgroup.com).