What is QoS?
Our industry really does not help itself with it’s vast array of terminology and acronyms. This can often confuse businesses and lead to poor decisions being made. To help, this blog intends to untangle some of these “buzzwords” and acronyms into plain English to help your business understand what is available and how you can benefit. This week we will look at QoS, or quality of service.
QoS is a great telecoms buzzword that is actually at the heart of another; namely Voice over IP. It is also a key topic to fully understand when looking to deploy any modern network solution, application or telephone system.
QoS is an industry-wide set of IT standards for ensuring high quality performance for critical applications within a network. Traditionally, the concept of network quality was based on size and ensuring all data traffic was treated equally. Therefore if your applications began to “bottleneck” or run slowly a business would need to enhance their existing network. Here is the core issue and explains why the need for QoS protocols was necessary when looking at modern business networks.
As George Orwell almost said “All data is created equal, but some data must be more equal than others”. If you treat all data equally, more bandwidth hungry applications are not given priority and therefore the entire network will not be able to deliver guarantees on reliability, delay or variation. This is seen as a major issue when passing voice over a network, as voice is exceptionally bandwidth hungry and must be given priority.
Enter Quality of Service
QoS has the primary goal of providing a preferential delivery service to all network applications, from email to video. A QoS enabled network must ensure every application has sufficient bandwidth to operate at their optimum capabilities. Qos ensures networks are also variable. This means network administrators are able to provide priority to applications based on human, business requirements as opposed to cold technical analysis. So if email must be delivered the second you hit enter, then the administrator can give email the ultimate priority on the network despite the fact that voice quality will suffer as a result and that common sense dictates otherwise!
In deploying and managing a QoS network businesses are looking to the future. It will ensure time and mission critical activities are delivered promptly and are assigned the resource they require. A business’ end users will also benefit from a QoS enabled network and will enjoy a quick, smooth experience which ultimately increases efficiency and reduces wasted resources.
Aerial Business Communications has a vast knowledge of modern business networks and are able to design and manage the perfect solution for your organisation. Contact today on 02392 737 513 to discuss your needs.