New company intabank brings back bandwidth trading
Intabank allows companies needing additional, short-term connectivity to purchase it from others with excess capacity, rather than buying from service providers that normally require a long-term commitment. It is the brainchild of chief executive Andrew Sjoquist, and sales and marketing director David McGrath, co-founders of Australian cloud provider ASE.
The company will initially offer connectivity to and from the data centres used by ASE in Australia. It has facilities in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Frankfurt, London, Paris, New Jersey and San Jose, and says it plans to add six data centres in coming months.
Non-ASE customers can access the bandwidth by buying a connection to one of the company's data centres from a local service provider.
Mr Sjoquist said the company was born from requests by customers wanting to exploit spare communications capacity, or gain access to capacity for peak periods without being locked into long-term contracts. He said customers were achieving significant savings.
"The test companies ... have been seeing prices that are at discounts of 50-80 per cent of what they would normally pay, and the sellers are recouping 10-15 per cent of the cost of their capacity."
Mr Sjoquist said companies could buy connectivity according to the file size they wanted to send, or the bandwidth. "You can specify the size of the file and the price you want to pay and we will see what speed we can give you. Or you specify the speed you want and the file size, and we will quote you a price."
Read the full story at theage.com.au/it-pro
Frequently Asked Questions about this Article…
Intabank is an Australian company that has revived the idea of bandwidth trading — the buying and selling of spare internet communications capacity. It lets companies needing short-term connectivity purchase excess capacity from other businesses instead of committing to long-term contracts with traditional service providers.
Intabank was founded by Andrew Sjoquist (chief executive) and David McGrath (sales and marketing director), who are also co‑founders of Australian cloud provider ASE, bringing practical cloud and data‑centre experience to the bandwidth trading model.
The company initially offers connectivity to the data centres used by ASE, with facilities in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Frankfurt, London, Paris, New Jersey and San Jose, and it plans to add six more data centres in the coming months.
Non‑ASE customers can access the marketplace by purchasing a connection to one of intabank's data centres from a local service provider, which then allows them to buy short‑term capacity traded on intabank's platform.
Yes. Intabank offers flexible buying options: you can specify the file size you want to send and the price you want to pay and the company will find the speed it can deliver, or you can specify the speed (bandwidth) and file size and receive a quoted price.
According to the article, test companies have seen prices at discounts of around 50–80% compared with what they'd normally pay, while sellers have been able to recoup roughly 10–15% of the cost of their capacity.
Bandwidth trading was first pioneered around 2000 by energy company Enron, but the original idea collapsed a few years later. Intabank is reviving that concept with a modern marketplace focused on short‑term connectivity and data‑centre integration.
Businesses that need temporary or peak‑period capacity can use intabank to avoid long‑term lock‑in, potentially achieve significant cost savings, and buy capacity matched to specific file sizes or bandwidth needs rather than committing to ongoing contracts.
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