As a teen, the concept of commodities trading was something that was difficult for me to grasp. The notion of the stock market—investing money in companies that you believe will be successful—made sense, but the notion of trading agricultural products and inanimate materials like gold did not.

While a company in the stock market could leverage my investment to grow business, what were commodities like wheat and oranges going to do with investments people made in them? Meanwhile, there was the mystery of what made things like soybeans and pork bellies significant.

Most of my questions were answered when I reached college, but not in an economics or business class (I was in the liberal-arts/journalism track, where such classes were avoided like the plague). Instead, commodities trading was clarified to me in the 1983 comedy Trading Places, which starred a young Eddie Murphy as Billy Ray Valentine, a street-smart criminal who amazingly takes the financial world by a storm after receiving a quick primer on commodities markets.

In today’s digital society, one of the most significant assets to have is access to bandwidth, which allows information to flow between people and machines at lightning speeds. And bandwidth is even better when it can be accessed anytime and virtually anywhere via a wireless connection, which requires access to spectrum.

Can bandwidth and spectrum—the fuel for mobile bandwidth—become modern-day commodities? Should they be commodities? If bandwidth were commoditized, what would the market look like, and how would it change communications policy and economics in the future?

We’ll examine these questions and more at 1:00 p.m. EST tomorrow during a free webinar that will be sponsored by Rivada Networks, which has developed a patented combination of dynamic spectrum arbitrage (DSA) and tiered priority access (TPA) that Rivada Networks CEO Declan Ganley believes can be used to establish a commodities market for excess bandwidth capacity and spectrum that is not being used regularly by an operator.