BandZ: enabling the decentralized sharing of bandwidth/internet!

About BandZ
The BandZ Network was established in mid-2017 with headquarters and Intellectual Property rights held in Toronto, Canada. BandZ is a business focused on decentralizing the internet. BandZ is a global p2p extranet project with the aim of making internet connections censorship- resistant, secure, cheaper, as well as accessible over larger distances and in low infrastructure areas. Blockchain software is being built to provide the services that will be available to BandZ users on its extranet (VPN, rotating proxy, secured communications, mesh networks, and more). BandZ offers novice users the ability to access these enterprise-grade internet services at a low cost. BandZ will also enable peers to provide these services to each other via the exchange of bandwidth as payment, denominated in the BandZ token. All underpinned by BandZ secure proprietary blockchain technology.

BandZ Vision
Our vision is to create a robust, super-cheap extranet experience that changes enterprise-grade network infrastructure from a premium purchase to a downloadable, pay-as-you-go app with over ten times the cost savings when compared to the same services available on the market today. Adopting blockchain technology to develop the monetization of BandZ will enable the network to incentivize rapid user adoption. Additionally, blockchain architecture will improve transparency, security and allow BandZ to make internet access cheaper and geographically agnostic for the end user. The goal is a global extranet which treats each individual user as their own intranet. If this can be accomplished, then the underdeveloped parts of the world can truly unlock the financial potential of both the internet and the blockchain.

Market Analysis
Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
ISP companies have been growing 8.8% on average from 2012 to 2017. Demand for bandwidth is not expected to slow down. Many ISP companies are experimenting with the technology we are employing at BandZ. The problem with ISPs is that they have high operational expenditures (OPEX) and overhead and cannot afford to stray from their business model without risking losses from their userbase. The BandZ software will enable ISPs to interact with other ISPs and create partnerships so that users can use their devices internationally while still being tied to their providers. This will enable users to enjoy a more robust, comfortable, and global experience.

Blockchains
Blockchains are the conceptual children of Bitcoin. Blockchains are ledgers which are incredibly difficult to defraud. Their core purpose is to provide consensus over networks, which is now being applied to financial markets to make payments protocols. Despite their liquid aspirations, most blockchain coins/tokens sit in cold storage to accrue
value. The market has yet to create the opportunities for these coins/tokens to find viral circulation and thus their values increase on a speculative bases until the time at which these opportunities come to exist or not. BandZ is a token which is not intended for value storage. It is not a security by any means. The vision of the founders is not to make some asset by which speculators and investors would create wealth. The vision of the founders is to commoditize internet services, turning data packet transmission directly into currency. Our aim is to make internet access cheaper (ideally self-paid), and accrue value to the network via a high velocity of BandZ circulation from peer to peer.

Use Cases

P2P File Transfer Systems
P2P file transfer systems generate almost one third of all end user upload traffic over the internet. Despite their popularity, these systems are very susceptible to bad performance, mostly because of supply and demand misalignments. Some peers are undersupplied, while others have more than they need; this imbalance is exclusively file-based. A metered extranet, such as that proposed by BandZ, will allow peers to monitor the bandwidth demand of specific files. Undersupplied files alert additional peers to deliver their excess resources via our helper algorithm.

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
The global VPN market is worth over $1 Billon USD today. This figure is expected to rise to over 106 Billion by 2022 via a cumulative annual growth rate of 13%. VPNs are often associated with illegal and devious behaviors by the mass media. It is one of the worst misconceptions in technology. Companies use VPNs all the time via intranets and you cannot really be a working company in the tech sector without one. 30% of individual internet users around the world have accessed a VPN at least once before.
Mobile technologies are expected to catalyze the market into the levels forecasted by 2022. Individuals, too, can secure their communications with VPNs or circumvent internet geo- restriction and censorship in certain countries. The application comes with risks and benefits, but so does innovation and freedom.

Mesh Networks
Mesh nets are groups of smart devices (phones, tablets, etc.) which connect to each other’s WiFi so that internet ranges and accessibility can be improved (cosmic nutshell, again). A lot of remote areas are not profitable enough for ISPs to develop infrastructure towards. Even now your router does not cover the entire area of your home. Finally, that beautiful concept called the Internet of Things (IoT), it does not work as superfluously as it could without greater signal ranges and lowered data costs. Without a mesh-net the congestion of all these smart value-added, wireless services would be unbearable. BandZ’ personalized bandwidth limits and packet synchronization will fully utilize
the truly global opportunity of the IoT. With BandZ, we want to create nodes for internet devices of all sorts to connect directly, dynamically and non-hierarchically and cooperate with one another to route data from/to clients. This lack of dependency on one node allows for every node to participate in the relay of information. The ability to self-configure enables dynamic distribution of workloads, particularly if a few nodes should fail. This in turn contributes to fault-tolerance and reduced maintenance costs.

Rotating Proxies
Rotating Proxies differ from VPNs. VPNs provide users with an alternate IP address. Rotating proxies provide users with a list of IP addresses and randomly sift through them each time a user accesses a site. A rotating proxy makes sure users are not easily recognized by web servers. This way, you can be sure that all your IPs are used evenly, thus decreasing the likelihood of any of them getting banned by your target website server. By making sure the proxies are reliable, divided into groups, and have those groups be rotated, proxies provide a defense against data analytics that would track your behavior regardless of an alternate IP address attained via VPN.

P2P Bandwidth Marketplace
Bandwidth is a consumable commodity, which we access every day. A criterion for good money rests on three characteristics: store of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange. Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have a value proposition founded on their store of value, they are incredibly hard to defraud and therefore each transaction is mathematically unique.
BandZ is making a play on the medium of exchange. Money exists so we can make transaction of real, consumable goods fungible. One step better is to make the consumable good fungible and the medium of exchange itself. This makes the market extremely liquid with less intermediary functions and deadweight loss.

Global Extranet
Intranets and Extranets: Intranets are private networks accessible only to the members of said networks. Intranets serve an organization’s digital communications needs. They also provide a secure space for storing, accessing and developing electronic materials. Extranets are intranets that allow access to authorized sets of external users as determined by the members of that intranet, without granting full access to the intranet itself. Their major use in the business world is to facilitate cooperation between different companies on joint projects, initiatives and information sharing. They also allow companies to connect with customers in a more controlled setting than the Internet. Extranets also allow multiple companies to access network services provided by another company, such as a data-processing application developed and maintained by one company that other companies utilize on their own intranets.
BandZ wants to treat each user node as its own contained intranet. Each user node can provide services (VPN, mesh, proxy, bandwidth sharing, and additional cloud services) to other users by treating all nodes other than itself as an extranet network. All the services will be monetized by the BandZ token.

Project Review
Introduction to the BandZ Network: IP addresses and bandwidth are a valuable commodity with bigger players able to outright own and lease them as property. Ordinary consumers do not have the resources to access this sort of market in any way other than as a customer. The BandZ Network is a decentralized extranet with the aim of transforming the ISP industry from a business into a decentralized global protocol. The BandZ Network aims to allow providers, which is anyone who has an internet connection on their device, the ability to access and provide enterprise grade software P2P. Recently cloud storage has moved to the blockchain, now too private networking infrastructure services.

How to Participate
To participate in the network as a provider, one simply needs to run a BandZ node on their device. BandZ nodes will run on windows, mac, linux, ios, android, and arm devices as of now. One may also integrate their existing app or product with the BandZ Software Development Kit (SDK). The BandZ SDK allows you to monetize your digital assets by running a BandZ node on your user’s behalf. Providers then earn money for every 1MB they forward; BandZ nodes can forward both TCP traffic and UDP. To participate as a consumer you need to run a BandZ node, or join a BandZ pool. We believe BandZ pools will naturally form for bandwidth buyers, allowing these buyers to enter the BandZ
Network without having to run a BandZ node and transact in BandZ at all (this means unsophisticated users can immediately enter the network). Note that using a BandZ pool will expose your traffic to the pool operator as the end to end encryption BandZ provides happens when traffic enters a BandZ node. As a consumer, connecting to a BandZ node may be done via basic proxy protocols like Socks5 or HTTP. Otherwise one can forward traffic directly into a BandZ node using IP Tables, traffic shaping rules, kernel hooks or other craft; this allows you to forward things like UDP or SCTP traffic. BandZ does not support nor use the VPN protocol or any other distinguishable protocol.
As a consumer one can choose which provider their traffic exits from based on country, city, whether the IP is a datacenter, residential or LTE/4G/3G/Edge address, and other filters. The marketplace supply and demand will determine the prices for these choices.

Token Axioms and Fundamentals
Axioms:
1) Fixed number (supply) of BandZs Tokens
2) The token is not mineable and will be released over a predetermined time period
3) BandZ are exclusive use within BandZ Network for bandwidth extranet service purchases
4) The token’s value floats freely based on the market’s demand

Economic Rules:
1) BandZs Token price is an intrinsic function of –
• The real-world value set by traditional bandwidth providers
• The regular settlement value of BandZ Network Exchange and Service prices
• The number of tokens in circulation
2) Token price is also a function of buyers, sellers and holders and their views of the BandZ Network future potential value and utility

Fundamental Consequences:
1) BandZ Token market performance and metrics will be transparent to all participants
2) Token release schedules and rules are modelled via a forecast of market growth and liquidity requirements
3) Community participants will need to keep some “base stock” of tokens to allow for variation in their bandwidth usage, slightly reducing liquidity and circulation
4) In addition to the anchoring of BandZ’ price to the cost of bandwidth, the dollar size of the Bandwidth volumes exchanged and the effects of tokens being released and reserved, there will be an additional behavioural pricing adjustment based on an double-auction system for bandwidth trading

Project Website, Visit here, read the Whitepaper here