Picture this: it's 2003. You're a hard-working telecommunications executive with one of the 100,000 competing carrier companies worldwide. No doubt about it-the telecom business isn't what it used to be. Remember the good old days when there were only 200 phone companies around the globe and often just one for each country? But that was before the World Wide Web, global deregulation and an ever-growing supply of bandwidth changed everything.

Your job is to manage data and voice-carrying capacity between Asia and Europe. Hourly, you check the spot market prices for long-distance minutes on the London-Hong Kong route with one of the 15 or so Web-based bandwidth exchanges that have sprung up all over the world. Indeed, as of 2003, bandwidth has become a commodity traded as easily as crude oil, cocoa beans or copper. Good news! Looks like those futures contracts you picked on the Macao-Berlin connection will pay off handsomely. Time to call your boss over the Internet telephone network and gloat.