How can QoS (Quality of Service) improve quality?
Consider the situation where you are having a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) conversation with a friend when your workmate sends an email with all his holiday photos attached – during which your friend cannot hear you properly because your voice is choppy. VoIP is achieved as two ‘streams’ of data – your voice is digitised and sent as a stream of packets to the other party; at the same time as their voice is sent to you. As long as the packets arrive quickly and in the correct order, your friend hears your voice at excellent quality. Since your ADSL or cable connection has less uplink bandwidth than downlink bandwidth, the email and its attachments could take a minute to send during which other types of Internet traffic (including the outgoing VoIP data) have to fight to get through. The result is that some of your voice packets time out before reaching your friend, and what your friend hears is very choppy. QoS allows you to instruct your router to send VoIP at high priority (to
