This paper outlines trends reshaping the business of International Long Distance (ILD) voice minutes trading. Our analysis is centered on Arbinet's business model: an electronic market-place for trading ILD voice minutes. Arbinet, who adopted a minute-based termination model, claims to have switched about 12 x 109minutes in 2005 with 13% growth. Since 2003, other competitors, like Stealth's VPF (Voice Peering Fabric), entered the long distance voice market by introducing different flavors of VoIP (Voice over IP) peering. VPF, who adopted a flat pricing scheme, claims to have routed traffic for an equivalent 18 x 109minutes in 2005 with 750% annual growth. VPF installed its first switch in London late 2005, thus stepping into the ILD arena. The huge growth of flat peering exchanges does not necessarily imply that Arbinet has to give up its minute-based termination model in favor of flat or free peering arrangements. As a matter of fact, the way termination model will change in the future is far to be clear. Drivers that determine who will be fit to survive in this thinly profitable business are thus emphasized.

A switch model for ATM networks is analyzed. Its interconnection network is internally nonblocking and is provided with dedicated input and output queues, one per switch inlet and one per switch outlet. The switch operates with an internal speed-up: more than one packet per slot can be transferred from the head-of-line positions of the input queues to each output queue by the interconnection network. Two different operation modes are considered for the interaction between input and output queues: backpressure mode and queue loss mode. The analytical model developed for the evaluation of the switch performance under random traffic assumes an infinite size for the switch, arbitrary values for input and output queue size, as well as for the speed-up factor. Switch throughput, packet delay and loss performance are evaluated and the analytical model accuracy is assessed using computer simulation results.>