What is Quality of Service? (QoS)

I regularly get asked about how businesses can ensure their mission critical traffic gets priority over general network traffic. Many think that this is limited to internal networks, but as more of our business applications move to the cloud (be this public or private), we need to ensure that essential traffic is prioritised over those videos of fluffy puppies on YouTube.

So how do we do this?

Well, if we are talking Wide Area Networking (WAN) for example, we would talk Quality of Service (QoS). You can watch the short video here for a quick overview of this.

Elements like Voice over IP (VoIP) need this guaranteed bandwidth to function. That’s why when we talk about voice services via our hosted telephony platform, we also talk about a converged ethernet/broadband service. This provides Quality of Service and prioritisation for your voice traffic over those fluffy puppy videos (or in my case the latest Thor trailer).

There are many different ways in which we can ensure data integrity on the network. First, we need to understand what you need to prioritise, and what your bandwidth usage is against what you have available.

Here is one for you to ponder: when is an email a real time communication tool? I’ll answer on Twitter in a few days (follow me @WarrenFree), but in the meantime, do let us know your thoughts on that by tweeting me or our main account, @TSGltd. #realtimecommunication.