Quality of Service (QoS) is a communication protocol employed on networks, which can prioritize types of traffic being carried over the network for the purpose of ensuring speed and/or quality. Most of the time, the traffic type which you’d want to prioritize is voice traffic, so that it can be received with crystal-clear quality at the end of transmission.
Of course, during times when there is very little traffic on the network, prioritization is not really necessary, since your VoIP calls will all sound great because they’re automatically receiving top priority. Where QoS really comes into play is when the network is very busy, with either many data transfers or a large volume of data transfers, all competing for bandwidth with VoIP calls. Without QoS protocol in place, voice calls could very easily become degraded because of that competition for transfer priority with data.
What is the best use for QoS?
QoS is used most effectively on local area networks, intranets, and private corporate networks, where all communications are managed by internal equipment and protocols. When information is sent over the Internet, QoS tags are stripped away, and those packets then have equal priority with everything else in the cyber world, which means quality is subject to local conditions at all times. The same would be true of course in a local area network which had only unmanaged switches in place – all local area network traffic would be sent just as it is received, without regard to any kind of prioritization scheme.
This can very easily lead to inconsistent quality in VoIP calls, especially during times of heavy traffic, since they would be sharing bandwidth with data packets. Short of a network-wide upgrade of bandwidth, the most effective LAN solution would be to install QoS-capable routers and switches, so that the installed VoIP platform components can alert the network to the fact that priority voice data is coming, and those voice packets could then be tagged with identifying QoS markings.
Why is QoS needed for LANs?
There’s a very good reason for using QoS protocols on corporate LANs, university intranets, or hospital networks to preserve the quality of voice calls. In such settings, voice packets are often in competition with other kinds of traffic like video chats, gaming sessions, and Internet downloads, and all of these would ordinarily have the same processing priority as important business calls would have. QoS can be setup at the router level in such installations to give priority to all voice calls, since they are almost always more relevant to the business than the other types of communications.
The net result of this kind of setup will be that all other network traffic might move a little more slowly during peak traffic times, but the quality of voice calls will never be degraded. Having QoS protocols established on your local area network can be just a phone call away, and your phone provider at VoxSun can help ensure that all important business calls will have the kind of integrity and clarity that you need to efficiently conduct business.
