vernmental agency or accredited third-party. 7 Broadband QoS Parameters, KPIs, and Measurements 7.3.2 Internet Traffic Interconnection With the transition to all-IP networks, the interconnection points are also becoming IP-based (i.e. they are used for exchange of IP traffic). Most Internet traffic exchange is done with peering and transit agreements, as discussed in Chapter 2 of this book. The peering is an agreement in which two interconnecting ISPs carry each other's traffic. In such case there is no obligation to carry traffic from a third-party ISP. On the other hand, transit refers to business and technical arrangement in which a given ISP agrees to carry Internet traffic on behalf of another ISP. In most of the cases the transit provider carries traffic to and from every destination on the public Internet, which is typically part of the transit arrangement. While transit is always based on certain payment for the IP traffic transport, peering can be paid or free. Both paid peering and partial or mutual transit were widely estab- lished from the privatization of the Internet around 1995. However, peering and transit business agreements are not publicly available, hence the traffic data referred to them is also unavailable. The number of ASs, which have autonomous routing and traffic management mech- anisms (the reader may refer to Chapter 2 for more details regarding ASs), continues to grow constantly (Figure 7.3). This implies that the ASs are more richly connected than in the past, while the number of ASs that IP traffic traverses end-to-end span across 3-5 ASs (as noted in Chapter 2), which directly influences the end-to-end QoS (lower number of ASs and generally network nodes end-to-end results in lower delay and delay variation as well as lower loss probability). In practice, large network operators typically exchange Internet traffic with compa- rably large network operators, based typically on nondisclosure peering arrangements and direct connections between the network operators. Regarding the Inter