Quality of Service, or QOS for short, is a feature that allows you to prioritize certain types of traffic over others. This can be extremely important when it comes to gaming and streaming video, for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you’re someone who relies on these activities, then you’ll want to make sure your router has QOS enabled. In this blog post, we will discuss what QOS is and why you should care!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you have an important online business meeting and you are getting a lot of buffering because your kids are upstairs streaming Netflix in 4k and playing video games then you need QoS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These are the type of situations Quality of Service (QoS) aims to solve. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
QoS optimizes your router to identify different types of traffic and prioritize them according to your needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You simply set up categories like videoconferencing, gaming, and VoIP calls to take precedence over any other type of traffic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this way, your router will make sure there’s always enough bandwidth available for those activities before allocating it elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Only enable QoS on your router if you are confident it will actually improve your network performance; otherwise, it could do more harm than good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
QoS, or Quality of Service, won’t necessarily offer any improvements if your bandwidth is already sufficient. Furthermore, if QoS isn’t set up correctly, it can actually lead to a performance decline. With that being said,QoS can be quite beneficial if you are facing an issue that it can help resolve. Incorrectly setting up QoS will actually result in a performance degradation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you’re having difficulty with choppy voIP quality due to sporadic internet service outages at your location(s), incorporating port-forwarding into your network design for specific devices on the LAN hosting VoIP services may improve call quality and reliability by directing traffic from those ports straight to the Broadband Router\/Modem (uplink) without passing through other switches first where packets could potentially become queued or delayed waiting behind others ahead of it destined for different locations on the Internet .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you have enough bandwidth, there’s no need to use QoS. Here\u2019s an example: You have a 1000 Mbps (1 Gbps) internet connection that you primarily use for video conferencing. You set up QoS so video calls are prioritized and file downloads are limited to 200 Mbps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you’re in a videoconference with multiple users that’s using up 300 Mbps of your bandwidth, and you’re also downloading a 200 GB file at the same time, then out of your 1000 Mbps connection, only 500 Mbps total are being used. Your video call is already utilizing everything it needs; there’s no way to assign more to it just because it doesn’t need it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Additionally, your file is slower to download due to the fact it can only use 200 Mbps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Understandably, this makes the process take much longer than necessary. From what we can see, turning on QoS isn’t always the smartest move to make. To use QoS correctly, you must first have a full understanding of how much bandwidth will be required.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are three types of QoS:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By device: You can prioritize traffic by the devices on your network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By application: You can prioritize traffic by the applications being used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By services: You can prioritize traffic by the type of service being used, such as VoIP or video streaming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We recommend using QoS by application, as it’s typically the most effective method.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some routers can prioritize traffic by either knowing the device’s IP address or by differentiating between the apps you use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But how does it know how to differentiate by service? Which is, in fact, one of the most common ways to set up QoS, even in business environments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Different types of data, like downloads or VOIP calls, travel through the internet using different identification tags called “ports.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, FTP (file transfer protocol) uses ports 20 and 21. E-mail usually goes through port 25, and Internet browsing generally occurs on ports 80 or 443. Your router doesn’t need to know exactly what you’re doing; it will just prioritize traffic from one port over the others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The specifics of how to set up QoS will vary depending on your router. But in general, the process usually involves these steps:<\/p>\n\n\n\n