In today’s world, businesses and industrial facilities use many applications such as VoIP, remote monitoring, and video surveillance that cannot tolerate delays. Legacy IP network design is first in-first out, which often means delays. This is where quality of service (QoS) comes in. 

QoS is an integral part of business networks. It’s not just about call quality and VoIP, but it also impacts how you access the internet, how you use remote monitoring, how your employees connect to the network from home or on the go, and more. 

QoS is a critical component of business and industrial networks. What follows details QoS and its important role in business networks. We’ll also cover what you need to know about this technology and how it can improve your network performance. 

So, How Does It Work? 

Quality of service is a network term used to describe the ability of a network to provide high-quality connections for applications that require special attention like voice and video. In other words, it’s a measure of how well traffic flows through your network. 

QoS is important for businesses because it allows you to prioritize your critical applications over less important ones, ensuring that employees can perform their jobs effectively. QoS helps make sure everyone can get where they’re going without having to wait too long or fight through heavy traffic jams. 

In simple terms, it tries to manage traffic so that high-priority packets receive preference over low-priority ones. This allows for better usage and sharing of bandwidth, which in turn helps boost business performance. 

QoS can be achieved in two ways: 

  • By upgrading your network hardware. 
  • Customizing the software that works by placing rules on your traffic so certain types of packets have priority over others. 

In addition to making your network faster and more stable, using QoS techniques can also help reduce latency, the amount of time it takes for data packets to reach their destination, and increase throughput, the amount of data that can transmit at once. This makes QoS an essential part of any business network. 

The Benefits of QoS 

Quality of service is a system that allows administrators to prioritize network traffic based on the needs of different applications. This means that administrators can assign priority levels to different types of traffic and ensure that critical applications like video conferencing or VoIP calls get the bandwidth they need to run smoothly without affecting other less critical communications such as email, IMs, or social media posts. 

This gives businesses different advantages, including: 

1. Improves Resource Optimization 

By prioritizing certain applications over others, businesses can make sure their users have access to the resources they need when they need them most — no more waiting around for files to download. 

QoS helps you optimize resources by ensuring that each user gets the bandwidth they need at all times. This means that users don’t have to compete with each other for bandwidth and, therefore, won’t waste time waiting for their applications to load or update data. 

This also helps prevent bandwidth congestion during peak usage hours when everyone is trying to access your applications at once. 

2. Improves Application Prioritization 

If you want to make sure that certain applications receive priority treatment over others, QoS is the key. This means that if there are two apps competing for bandwidth on your network, one could get prioritized based on its importance and work faster than the other. 

For example, if you have an application that requires low latency but doesn’t require much throughput (like an internal website), QoS will give it priority over an application with high latency but high throughput (like an external website). 

QoS Application Priority

3. Improves User Experience 

QoS ensures that data packets are in the right order by ensuring each packet has the bandwidth required to deliver successfully. This means that your employees can get their work done faster and more efficiently, which means they’ll be more efficient themselves and less stressed. 

Therefore, QoS improves user experience by ensuring that traffic is snappier and there’s less interference from other types of traffic on the network. 

4. Provides Efficient Traffic Management 

Another benefit of QoS is that it can help ensure your applications run as smoothly as possible, even without jitters. 

Jitter occurs when there’s too much variation in the amount of time between data packets being sent over a network connection. By reducing jitter, you can improve your application performance tremendously. 

For example, if you’re running an online store and have 100 people shopping at once, they’ll all be competing for their own slice of bandwidth; but with QoS enabled on your router and switch gear (and on each device), each person will get just enough bandwidth to run their shopping experience smoothly without affecting anyone else’s experience. 

QoS and Jitter

5. Prevents Latency 

QoS also helps you avoid latency, which refers to delays in sending or receiving data over a computer network. Latency can cause problems ranging from minor delays in sending an email attachment to major issues like crashing an entire server. 

When you have a high QoS, your latency (the time it takes for data to reach its destination) is minimized. 

6. Prevents Data Loss 

With QoS, you can be sure that all your important business data will be delivered quickly, accurately, and without any loss. It works to prevent data loss or packet loss, so that everything you send gets where it needs to go and arrives intact. 

What Are the Applications of QoS? 

QoS is an important factor that determines how your business network performs. It’s an integral part of the infrastructure of your network, and it can be used to improve performance in a number of ways, including: 

  • Improving VoIP calls and other audio services so that they’re clearer and less likely to drop. 
  • Improving video streaming so that it’s more reliable and high quality. 
  • Reducing latency when using VoIP or video conferencing applications. 
  • QoS can also help to improve network security and fortify your networks against external threats like viruses and malware. 

QoS can help you do all these by providing a method of prioritizing traffic over the network and ensuring that important data packets are delivered on time.

How Will QoS Help Your Business? 

QoS is so important because it helps ensure that your business’s most important applications can always function as expected, even in times of high traffic or other stressors on the network. 

This can be especially beneficial if your company operates in any industry that requires real-time communication with customers or clients (like health care or financial services). 

By ensuring that network problems such as congestion or slow speeds never interrupt these applications, you can ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

How Planet USA Can Help You 

QoS is an important part of any network, but it can be especially crucial for businesses and enterprises. If you’re looking for a way to improve your network performance, you’ve come to the right place. Planet Technology USA provides top-quality PoE switches, PoE media converters, and other products equipped with QoS. 

We have several years of experience in networking, and we know what it takes to make your business run smoothly. Our products have the latest features in mind, so they can handle even the most intense traffic without any problems. 

For any questions or concerns regarding our products or services, feel free to contact us today and learn more about how we can help your business network thrive.