How to Choose Your QoS Router With Bandwidth Manager for Best Results?
A cutting-edge QoS router (Quality of Service router) with smart bandwidth manager capabilities is a fundamental piece of today’s networks of medium sized businesses and larger enterprises.
With the accelerated adoption of hosted cloud-based services, the demand on the connectivity between the office and the data center is at an all-time high and is only going to get worse as applications continue to migrate to the cloud. This puts a serious strain on the WAN (Wide Area Network) connectivity in terms of sheer bandwidth but also how those resources are allocated by a bandwidth manager as part of a QoS router framework. Here are the 3 primary requirements that you, the IT manager, should expect from your QoS router:
- Real-time traffic handling. An agile and flexible toolset for bandwidth management of interactive traffic such as VoIP (Voice over IP) and VC (Video Conferencing) is a must-have in a QoS router. Look for layer7 deep-packet inspection capabilities with built-in layer7 libraries and more importantly the ability to carve out guaranteed bandwidth for those applications in an adaptive manner.
- Agile Outbound QoS. Legacy QoS routers are not able to guarantee bandwidth to specific traffic types and applications in a dynamic manner. Having a highly adaptive outbound QoS capability will provide guaranteed, carved-out bandwidth dedicated to the application, without compromising effective bandwidth utilization. In other words, the QoS mechanism should be smart enough to enable that carved-out bandwidth to be utilized by other applications if the real-time application at hand is not present in the network at that very moment.
- Inbound QoS. The importance of inbound QoS is usually overlooked and sometimes neglected by QoS router vendors because of its complicated nature, but as a client, you should not compromise and should demand effective inbound QoS features from your QoS router. To be fair, by definition, inbound traffic is not under your control as it is coming from outside. However, modern routers with cutting-edge bandwidth managers will be able to manage even the inbound traffic with high accuracy, providing much needed QoS in the inbound direction. This means that you will have crystal clear VoIP calls even while your coworker at the next desk is downloading his favorite dancing cat video from YouTube.
Cahit Akin, CEO, Mushroom Networks, Inc.
Mushroom Networks is the provider of SD-WAN (Software Defined WAN) and NFV solutions capable of Broadband Bonding that enables self-healing WAN networks that route around network problems such as latency, jitter and packet loss.