Quality of Service / VLAN

Now that almost every electronic device that we use these days connects to the internet, our networks are seeing greater load than ever before. To facilitate this, you have a limited amount of bandwidth available, and you are paying a premium for it. As such, it is of the utmost importance to optimize your local network to get the most you can out of it. There are many tools and strategies we deploy to balance a network, providing reliable and fast service where it is needed most. A lot of factors go into ensuring optimal network performance, and managing your LAN is one of the most important.

We utilize two primary tools to optimize local networks: QoS and VLAN. Quality of Service, or QoS, is actually an umbrella term for various strategies that are used to selectively manage network traffic for optimization. The Virtual LAN (VLAN) element is used to divide your network into smaller parts. We use these tools to dictate how traffic is passed through the network, making sure that the data transmission prioritizes the most important processes first. This ensures that critical systems always get the performance they require, at the expense of the less important systems.

Using VLAN to optimize your phone systems is a textbook example of this process. We sequester the phones into their own VLAN and prioritize the traffic for that group. As phone conversations require constant and clean real-time transmission, the traffic for this group takes high priority to ensure that load elsewhere in the network never affects your call quality. Another common case is creating a guest network for your visitors. You want to provide them with connectivity, but you certainly don’t want their personal activity to slow down your business processes. In addition, splitting the guest network off into a VLAN has the security advantage of separating them from your business network entirely, so they have no possible connection to your private resources.

The benefits of QoS and VLAN reach into many facets of IT, so if you have general concerns about your network performance and security, please check out our contact page and reach out to us! We can show you everything these tools have to offer.