Interoute announced today the launch of ARENA, a commission-free voice trading web based exchange in North America and Europe for the telecommunications industry. Arena enables operators to enter the voice market quickly without the infrastructure investment. By logging-on to the Arena web portal, a community of global and national carriers, resellers and ISPs connected to Interoute's Virtual Voice Network (VVN) can seamlessly open routes to each other, regardless of their location or the protocol they are using. Interoute is located in New York, Washington, DC and Atlanta in the U.S.

More than 100 customers, ranging from large national carriers such as Indian telecommunications operator VSNL and Czech Telecom through to ISPs and VoIP operators such as Streamdoor, have been using Interoute's VVN since it originated in May last year. There are now approximately 100 million voice minutes per month running across the network.

VoIP peering is going to be huge and it will have enormous political implications as it may not be possible to tax – at least in the traditional sense, traffic that goes from one VoIP network to another without touching the PSTN.