When the entire country is on one grid, distributing companies can take their power from whichever generating company at the least price. This has led to creation of energy trading. The same phenomenon is now infesting the telecoms bandwidth arena. Service companies collect traffic from end-users and transport it between various cities and countries over bandwidth. And bandwidth is being provided by a number of companies.
Trading can take place for the required amount of bandwidth, switched at the exchange.
The bandwidth required between different cities for different companies varies according to the time of day and the days of the week. The former monopolies are the ones most adversely affected ones because they are heavily engineer-oriented and are unable to cope up with the swiftly changing markets. Today, most of the telecoms firms in Europe are in a declining state. The reason is that they bid fantabulously for the 3G radio frequency spectrum. Not only have they to find the money to pay the spectrum fees, they also have to find money to roll out the network.