Real-time traffic, streaming traffic, bulk traffic, transactional traffic, and web content are the reasons your network is being asked to work harder than ever. Delivering these services to users, however, requires not only bandwidth, it requires the network itself to have the capability to determine how to accommodate the flow of that traffic.

Why? Because not all traffic is equal. Just as a speeding ambulance has priority in a sea of traffic on the highway, your business’ time-sensitive and mission-critical applications should have right-of-way.

Traditionally, the method used to accommodate network traffic can best be described as first-come, first-served: whatever bandwidth the application needs it gets, no matter what the repercussions. The result is delays, congestion, packet-dropping, jitter, unhappy users, and frazzled network managers.

The good news is that technologies such as quality-of-service (QoS) are available to help provide better service for network traffic by managing bandwidth allocations. With QoS, realtime and high-priority applications are handled differently than lower priority data applications. And QoS can also help limit the amount of undesirable traffic, including security threats.

If your business is now or will be utilizing any of the rich network applications available—voice-over-IP (VoIP) or videoconferencing, for example — you’ll want to think about where QoS fits into your plans.