Bandwidth trading-a business case for ASON?

During the last years bandwidth has been becoming more and more a commodity. Several network operators compete for customers with comparable offerings. This initialized the introduction of bandwidth brokers or traders. Unfortunately, their business models where not very successful in the past. Besides the overall economic weakness at the moment we identify some generic and technical reasons for this. Moreover we show that with novel automation technologies like GMPLS or ASON/ASTN some of these problems can be alleviated. Possible operational models show how future bandwidth brokers or traders could be organised.