Over the past half century, telecommunications policy has shifted increasingly to use of markets to govern use of and access to broadband. Despite the rise of markets for spectrum licenses, robust markets for fixed line capacity have not kept pace. This is significant insofar as there has been a decades-long increase in demand for transmission capacity fueled by mobile and cloud service providers. We argue that part of the reason why the current bandwidth markets – the internet exchange markets – have yet to develop commodity market features whereby anyone can buy bandwidth for current or future use at any time is because of specific historical challenges in the implementation of markets for high-speed wireline connectivity. These previous missteps in creating bandwidth markets are instructive for understanding obstacles to bona fide commodity markets for bandwidth today as well as offer insight into the ways to overcome them as well as the benefits from doing so to address the wireless crunch.