Global bandwidth marketplace comes out of beta

Australian-developed bandwidth marketplace Intabank has opened up to all comers, promising benefits for customers wishing to monetise spare network capacity.

The marketplace was started in 2011 by ASE IT founders Andrew Sjökvist and David McGrath. A spokesperson for the company told iTnews Intabank had been in in development since then and had piloted two unnamed customers, one in financial services and one in the media sector.

At a technical level, Intabank requires customers to be in one of the data centres it is active in. By ordering a network cross connect, either from Intabank or their own provider, customers can then start and allocate the amount of bandwidth to be tipped into a "dark pool" over a given amount of time.

This will then be matched to Intabank buyers when orders for burst capacity become available, with the price determined by how much buyers are willing to pay, in an eBay like bidding model.

"Sellers are seeing a recoup on expenses between 10-15 per cent of full costs. Buyers can expect to save anywhere between 50 - 80 per cent discount on full price bandwidth," the spokesperson claimed.

Intabank's offering is aligned with the ASE data centre infrastructure in ten locations around the world. in Australia, there are data centres in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, and Intabank is also available in major Asian cities such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo, as well as on the west and east coast of the United States.

There are three locations in Europe, and Intabank can make use of half of the 16 terabit/s lit capacity at any point in time. A further six data centres are will be added to Intabank's footprint in the coming months, the spokesperson said.

Intabank charges an undisclosed subscription fee to connect to a port, and commissions on sales.