Brain Bytes

What is QOS, and why do you care?

January 24, 2022 BECA, The IT Brainpower Company Season 1 Episode 32
Brain Bytes
What is QOS, and why do you care?
Show Notes Transcript

This week Blake and James dive into the wonderful word of QOS. Tune in to learn how these magic internet packet modifiers can prevent you from starring in the next AT&T commercial when your video happy hour turns into an HR nightmare! 

QOS was a staple of the well-groomed enterprise network, then everyone went home. The guys take a look at how this has impacted your day to day work, and how companies are trying to mitigate the damage!


Blake

Packet loss, jitter and delay. That service needs some quality. Let's talk QoS welcome back to Brain Brights. I'm Blake Boyd. And joining me, as always, is James Green. James, how are we doing today?

 


James

Doing well. How are you?

 


Blake

I'm doing fantastic. Today we're going going to talk about something that no one really knows about unless you're in the It world. But it's yet another thing that is impacting the world as everybody went to go work from home.

 


James

It is something that's impacting it. It's affecting it. And yes, nobody knows about it, but everyone needs it.

 


Blake

Exactly. And it's actually even a twofold because it's something you had at work and then you went home and don't have it. And now you're doing a bunch of video calls, right?

 


James

Yeah.

 


Blake

So what we're talking about today is Q-O-S, quality of service. So what Q OS, I guess is or does I don't know which of those verbs is correct, but it is a function of network equipment to essentially tag traffic with little Identifiers that says this is a video call or this is a voice call, or this is streaming video data and what the switches firewalls routers. What they can do with that traffic is prioritize it or in some cases dedicate chunks of the bandwidth for the network to that traffic to make your experience better overall. Right. So there's a couple of things that you as it does for this traffic that caused the positive impacts. Right. So an easy one, let's say for video conferencing or video streaming is bandwidth. Right. So let's say you're trying to do a video conference, but someone else is downloading a large update for their computer or for some software. Well, your video streaming data for your video conference can get tagged through QoS and the network equipment can prioritize a section of the bandwidth of your network, the available Internet speed, so to speak, and can prioritize that for your traffic.

 


Blake

So your video call will be smooth and will go through and you'll have good video quality and you won't be bouncing all over the place. But the person downloading that file, their download might slow down a little bit. And while that might be inconvenient to the person downloading it, they're just waiting a little longer. You're one of those at and T commercials or whatever it is where you're breaking up.

 


James

It's getting fragmented. And we've all experienced being on a video call and you get the person that starts to break up and you hear every third word. It's actually a really good commercial where someone goes to a holiday party and she misses the point where it's not a costume party, but it shows up in a costume because she didn't hear the word not. But yeah, we've all experienced it. And to your point, it's something that ideally your enterprise is doing. And so you don't even think about it while you're at work. But then you get home and now your kids are playing Xbox and someone else is trying to download an update or stream YouTube or whatever, and you're just trying to have a Zoom call. But you're getting the three little red bars or the yellow bars that say, hey, your video quality might not be so good. Well, that's because they're doing all these other things on your network that your home router might not be doing.

 


Blake

Right. And I guess this is kind of a well, here's the problem you're having, and there's not really much of a solution for It episode, which I guess maybe we don't like doing. But unfortunately, when it comes to QoS on home networks, chances are slim that your It Department would be willing to configure it, but also that you have equipment that can. But this, I guess, is more of an explanation of maybe why to help you understand. And if you call your It team or your support desk, like here at Becca, and they can't necessarily help you, this is something. Well, it worked at the office. Well, here's an example of why it worked at the office. Your office had business class or enterprise great network equipment configured two best practices for these things. And so just kind of helping you understand why maybe something doesn't work as well as it doesn't home. Right. So video is a pretty easy one to understand, especially when it comes to bandwidth. As far as all the things that POS can assist with, bandwidth is one of the easier, I guess, to comprehend for someone who's not an It.

 


Blake

But there is another concept in QoS that is kind of, I guess, a little deeper, but it goes more toward the voice side of things. Right. So if you've ever run a speed test, you get your upload and your download. And then there's that one called Ping. Right. P-I-N-G Ping. That is the amount of time it took for essentially your computer to talk to the Internet and the Internet to come back and acknowledge that your computer exists. Right. It's usually measured in milliseconds.

 


James

It's almost always milliseconds.

 


Blake

You definitely will start to notice some slow Internet if your Ping is like above 100 milliseconds, most people's Internet at home is 20 to 40, and then fiber connections are usually below ten, just for a baseline. Now that's Ping and you can actually and Ping is also called latency. It's the latent time between a request and an Acknowledgment. Right. So latency can impact voice calls, video calls, all that kind of stuff, too, because you make a request to get data from the Internet for your voice call, and it takes a longer amount of time than expected to get back. You just experience a slow connection.

 


James

Yeah. If you've ever been in the same room as someone that's on the same call as you and you hear them talk like live, and then you hear them talk in your headset. That's latency.

 


Blake

Yeah, exactly. Now there's a second layer of latency. I guess you'd call called jitter and that is the difference in latency over time. So let's say you start a call and at the start of the call you have a great connection and your latency is below ten because you're on a fiber connection or what have you and you're great. And then as the call progresses, someone boots up an Xbox, someone starts downloading a file, whatever. Someone else starts doing something on the network that impacts your latency. Now your latency is higher and you're starting to have quality issues on your phone call. That is called jitter. So jitter is the change in latency over a set duration. And what Q OS can do is it can kind of see that and it can again start prioritizing your traffic as a voice call or video call. It can start prioritizing that traffic to have the faster Ping to get those responses faster and level out that jitter. If you have ever been on WiFi and made a phone call and you have bad call quality, it's almost always jitter. It's not something you can control again, but with Q OS tagging voice traffic for priority on Ping and jitter, you can start to reduce some of those quality issues.

 


James

Yeah. And again, the quality and quality of service you want that consistent, especially on video calls, even if it's just audio. You want that consistency because you want that to be a great experience because we're not necessarily going into offices as much as we were. So that obviously this quality is fantastic face to face. But if you're having those virtual experiences, you want that experience to be as great as it can be in this remote environment.

 


Blake

Right. So again, I have an episode on hey, maybe it sucks at home and here's why, but you can't fix it. But if you have some technical prowess and you're poking around and stuff at your house and you see a QoS button, push it. It can't really hurt anything. And if your equipment can handle it, then you're a little better off than you were before.

 


James

Yeah, if you have that, it purse and your family ask them next time. Hey, can you look and see if I have QoS on my home router?

 


Blake

Yes, they'll be much happier than that. Can you make my internet faster?

 


James

Yeah. Right.

 


Blake

All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed and we will see you next week. Thanks.

 


James

See you. Bye.