Short Take: Williams considers bandwidth market

Williams Communications, a wholesale communications carrier, is considering a market for trading bandwidth and named Sharon Crow as the new vice president of bandwidth markets, the company announced today. A handful of other companies such as Arbinet, Enron and RateXChange have proposed commodity trading markets, where communications carriers can anonymously sell their excess network capacity. Crow previously worked in the energy unit of Williams Communications parent company, Williams, an oil and gas pipeline firm, where she ran the natural gas market operations.