Understanding Quality of Service (QoS).

Before we dive into Dynamic QoS, at its core, Quality of Service (QoS) is a technology designed to manage network traffic effectively. It prioritizes essential applications over less critical ones, ensuring that important network activities, like video calls, receive precedence over lower-priority tasks, such as streaming videos on Netflix.

Goals of QoS

• • Reduce Packet Loss: Ensures data packets reach their destination reliably.

• • Minimize Latency: Decreases the delay before a transfer of data begins following an instruction.

• • Eliminate Jitter: Avoids variations in packet delay at the receiving end, important for quality in real-time communication

The Evolution of Dynamic QoS

Traditional QoS systems operate on predetermined rules that allocate bandwidth to prioritized applications and create virtual queues for data packets. This method follows a basic first-in-first-out principle, where bandwidth is reserved for prioritized traffic.

Transition from Tradition:

• Dynamic QoS transcends these limitations by utilizing intelligent software to monitor and adjust traffic rules dynamically for optimized performance. Here’s how Bigleaf elevates this process:
• Intelligent Identification: Bigleaf identifies application traffic dynamically.
• Real-time Adjustment: Continuously adjusts QoS policies based on current network conditions to ensure high-priority traffic like VoIP, SSH, and Remote Desktop is not hindered by ISP congestion.

The Business Case for Dynamic QoS

Without effective QoS, network traffic can become chaotic, akin to rush-hour traffic with non-functioning traffic lights, leading to significant performance degradation. Bigleaf automates the identification and prioritization of traffic, eliminating the need for constant manual monitoring.

Benefits for your business:

1. Enhanced Productivity: Optimizes latency, allowing employees to remain productive and focused.
2. Improved Reliability: Prevents disruptions in VoIP calls, video conferences, and VPN sessions, ensuring smooth, reliable communication.
3. Cost Efficiency: Rather than upgrading to more expensive internet lines, Dynamic QoS provides a cost-effective solution by better managing existing bandwidth.

Optimizing Internet Performance with Bigleaf Networks

Many businesses attempt to improve slow internet speeds by increasing their service plans. However, Bigleaf Networks proposes a more strategic approach through Dynamic QoS, which ensures that cloud and SaaS applications perform optimally, regardless of the internet provider or location.

Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS:

As part of our comprehensive SD-WAN solution, Bigleaf offers AI-powered Dynamic QoS to support businesses reliant on stable and reliable internet connectivity across all applications and locations.

Learn More and Get Started

Discover more about how Dynamic QoS can transform your business network for better efficiency and performance:

• Request a Demo from Bigleaf Networks

By leveraging Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS, you can ensure that your business not only keeps pace with modern demands but also maximizes its technological investments

Not so very long ago, we all commuted to and from our offices every day for work, there were cars and traffic and freeways involved. Of course, then 2020 happened and suddenly we all worked remotely and began just commuting down the hallway of our own home instead of down the freeway.  As we enter 2024, hybrid work environments have become more and more common. Many of us now commute down the freeway two or three days each week and down our own hallway the rest of the week. 

While hybrid work is great for things like work/life balance, it presents certain challenges when it comes to basic connectivity. After all, your home internet connection isn’t the same as your office internet connection, and with many of us taking meetings via Zoom or Teams or Slack all day, internet connectivity, stability, reliability, and redundancy have become more important than ever. 

SD-WAN: The Backbone of Modern Workplaces 

At the core of this hybrid work frontier is SD-WAN, or Software-Defined Wide Area Network, which has become the most flexible and efficient solution for modern businesses with distributed networks.  

By separating control functions from physical infrastructure and applying software-defined networking principles, SD-WAN offers increased visibility into network traffic, dynamic path selection for optimal performance, and improved reliability by intelligently rerouting traffic. In other words, SD-WAN makes for a more reliable, stable, and adaptable network as compared to traditional WAN. 

Bigleaf’s Approach to SD-WAN 

By elevating what SD-WAN can be, Bigleaf has become an ideal solution for the intricacies of hybrid work models. For example, Dynamic QoS (Quality of Service) allows you to identify and prioritize certain traffic. What this means is that when you’re working from home you can give the traffic for your Zoom call priority over the kids watching Netflix in the other room, meaning that if there’s a network issue then their TV show might buffer but your video conference will remain crystal clear.  

Another huge benefit Bigleaf provides is Same IP Failover. In other words, you can have one network entirely fail and Bigleaf will switch all traffic to your other network without changing your IP address, meaning no dropped video calls or needing to log back in cloud-based applications, you likely won’t even know a network failure took place. 

These features, and more, add not only to the reliability but also the security of your network, particularly for remote work. Bigleaf also peers directly with over 150 cloud, content, and carrier networks private, direct connections to cloud applications.  

The Future of Hybrid Work 

These past few years have taught us that it really is anyone’s guess what’s right around the next corner. One thing is for certain though: as with life, business will continue to find a way. And business will always require reliable network connectivity. Bigleaf was built to scale right along with your business. From single circuit to multiple circuit to our High Availability solution, Bigleaf can improve your network today and grow with you into tomorrow.  

Whether your business operates in-office, remotely, or hybrid, Bigleaf has an SD-WAN solution to improve and optimize your network connectivity. Learn more today.

This content was originally published as part of our Linkedin Newsletter, Bigleaf Bytes, in January 2024. Subscribe now on LinkedIn.

Keep your internet applications, such as Zoom, RingCentral, and POS systems running without disruption or delay. Bigleaf SD-WAN ensures your cloud network runs optimally on the public internet, eliminating outages and downtime.

Learn how Bigleaf will keep your business operating smoothly.

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Networking is a distinct territory within IT with equally distinct jargon to match. One term you’ve probably heard of is quality of service (QoS) – technology that controls network traffic to ensure the performance of essential applications. 

Although quality of service is not a new concept, QoS and its latest variations are a hot topic regarding today’s SMB IT infrastructure. But what is Dynamic QoS, and how does it work? Is Dynamic QoS necessary for your business continuity and success? 

Read on as we answer your questions, explain its business implications, and show real-world examples of what makes Bigleaf Dynamic QoS technology an absolute game changer for SMBs. 

Let’s dive in.

What Is [Dynamic] QoS and how does it work?

In a nutshell, quality of service is a set of technologies or tools that manage and prioritize network traffic, ensuring the smooth, consistent performance of high-priority and real-time applications & traffic (even with limited internet capacity). 

These days, business applications aren’t only competing with many types of internet traffic; the applications are competing with one another (whether you work from home or a corporate office). While all apps within a network are subject to the consequences of bandwidth issues and poor connection quality, apps with real-time requirements feel the effects fast – think crappy choppy video conferences and VoIP calls. 

Internet disruptions like those aren’t just annoying for your teams and your customers. When meetings are interrupted or sales calls drop, operations are stalled, costing your business revenue, productivity, recovery & more. In fact, according to the latest data from Gartner, the average cost of network downtime or unusable uptime (when your internet is live but unstable) to your business is upwards of $300K per hour.

QoS mitigates these all-too-common connectivity and performance problems by working to reduce the effects of packet loss, latency, and jitter on a network, prioritizing and routing traffic through circuits in a way to best handle that of your business-critical apps such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, RingCentral, and other SaaS and cloud-based tools for VoIP, video conferencing, and video-on-demand.  

To put it simply, you can think of your internet connection as a massive, multi-lane freeway. When the flow of traffic starts to get heavy, QoS is like the carpool and bus-only lanes reserved for your high-priority apps, resolving traffic congestion.

Traditionally, QoS works by prioritizing packets based on manual policy and configuring routers that create separate virtual queues for each application. Bandwidth is reserved for the essential applications or websites that are assigned priority access. A network administrator usually allocates the order in which packets are handled and provides the appropriate level of bandwidth to each app or traffic flow. 

If that sounds tedious and limiting, it’s because it is. 

Plus, traditional solutions can only allocate bandwidth to internet traffic leaving the local network. Everything beyond the LAN is outside its control. So, traditional QoS solutions are helpful but, again, limited, especially in today’s work-from-anywhere business landscape.

Enter Dynamic QoS

Rather than using legacy, first-in-first-out (FIFO) methods, Dynamic QoS helps improve business-critical app performance by improving internet traffic management capabilities via bandwidth allocation and traffic prioritization techniques automatically. Instead of IT leaders or network administrators manually configuring QoS rules into your network, Dynamic QoS auto-adjusts traffic rules using intelligent software. 

When your Dynamic QoS tools and other SD-WAN capabilities work cohesively, the way the health of your internet connection and bandwidth is monitored, managed, and prioritized ensures the silky-smooth performance of your much-needed business applications. 

Whether you’re working in a household of hardcore gamers and streaming services junkies, or in a busy corporate office, Dynamic QoS recognizes and protects the services using minimum bandwidth + require low latency. 

Since Dynamic QoS reduces disruptions caused by problems like downtime, latency, and jitter, your network automatically becomes more cost-effective. So, your business, by default, becomes more productive.

Is Dynamic QoS really beneficial for business?

In a word, yes. Without proper QoS, network data can become disorganized to the point of causing performance degradation or worse. As mentioned above, that’s a $300K per hour problem that most SMBs can’t weather. 

And with Dynamic QoS, the identification and prioritization of traffic happen automatically, in real-time. So, you no longer need to spend time, and use staff or other resources to consistently monitor all the applications your business uses. 

In general, QoS, especially Dynamic QoS, empowers businesses and end-users by ensuring the cloud and internet apps they rely on work optimally. Optimizing latency allows employees to be as productive and focused as possible while keeping users happy: no more dropped VoIP calls, video conferences, or VPN sessions. 

Clearly, the benefits of QoS and its advanced, dynamic variant are integral to a thriving business. But are all services created equal? Not according to more than 100,000 users and counting who rely on Bigleaf Networks to provide them with truly reliable connectivity daily.

Why SMBs choose Bigleaf Dynamic QoS to intelligently prioritize internet traffic

“Bigleaf has architected a new kind of networking platform to deliver end-to-end connectivity to and from anywhere your traffic needs to go.” 

Like other SD-WAN solutions, we do three things here at Bigleaf. We monitor connectivity, route your traffic, and prioritize it. However, the way we do it here uses intelligent software instead of manual policy and configuration work. So, our customers can simply plug into the Bigleaf service and reap the benefits of performant connectivity almost immediately. 

Notably, the way we provide QoS prioritization across the public internet is unique even among other players in our industry. We can adapt to circuit conditions and bidirectionally control traffic over the internet to assure prioritization for your key applications. This means VoIP and video are always smooth, and those business-critical apps stay responsive even if other users in your network are downloading giant files. 

Our Dynamic QoS also works on a single Internet connection. So, you can still enjoy all the prioritization, circuit monitoring, and proactive alerting benefits Bigleaf offers while sticking to one circuit. 

Our self-driving AI approach utilizes Bigleaf Same-IP Failover and our patented Intelligent Load Balancing that all work together with our innovative Dynamic QoS technology to ensure your cloud applications are constantly performing. 

The benefits and use cases of QoS, especially Bigleaf’s AI-driven, Dynamic QoS, are numerous and make implementation worth the investment for your growing business.

Dynamic QoS: You don’t need more speed, just better prioritization

Let’s check out a real-world scenario that may look close to a situation you’d find yourself in. It’s a perfect example of QoS prioritization in action.  

Bigleaf Networks co-founder Joel Mulkey, an IT visionary, offers a quintessential example of the “less is more” approach. 

View Graph A below.  

At Joel’s home, the fastest circuit has about 6 Mbps of download speed. Recently, one of his kids purchased a brand-new video game from the digital distribution service Steam. Notice that the game was downloading during the day, saturating that circuit (red). Yet, throughout the day, that same circuit was the healthiest (in addition to being the fastest). So, our Intelligent Load Balancing placed Joel’s Zoom calls onto the path (green). 

Notice how QoS slows down the lower priority bulk data during those periods, which kept Joel’s Zoom calls perfectly clear. Now that’s how you prioritize traffic on your internet connection, especially one with such limited bandwidth! 

That’s the key value of Bigleaf’s AI-powered Dynamic QoS: it automatically identified the game as a type of traffic that shouldn’t have priority over a business-critical app like Zoom. 

So, there was no need to notify IT of a new app running through his circuit, the team didn’t need to create a new policy, and Joel was able to stay focused and productive, completing his business tasks without distractions.

Now, this was at Joel’s home in the Northwest US. But whether you operate out of a home office or run a multi-site, multi-state enterprise, Bigleaf Networks’ site-to-cloud SD-WAN technology delivers consistency and performance you can count on 

Imagine the same situation at a corporate office, where an employee might get invited to a video conference using an app that IT did not anticipate. Bigleaf Dynamic QoS recognizes that traffic and automatically prioritizes it, just as it would treat other VoIP and video call traffic.    

Find more insights in Bigleaf’s customer success stories.

Dynamic QoS: Optimizing the internet for your business

At Bigleaf, we understand that when it comes to getting work done — no matter what internet provider you’re using, no matter your location, and no matter what kind of organization you run — if you rely on cloud and SaaS applications for business, they need to function optimally. So, we set out to create the most effective Dynamic QoS tools to help deliver the performance you need. 

We provide AI-powered Dynamic QoS as a part of our SD-WAN solution to supercharge businesses throughout the USA and Europe, who need truly reliable internet connectivity for every application, every technology, every user, everywhere — over any ISP. 

Learn how Bigleaf can transform your business for the better by requesting a FREE demo. If you have any questions, send us an email at sales@bigleaf.net.  

This is Joel here, Founder and CEO of Bigleaf, and that’s a question I got tired of having to find answers for. Back when I came up with the concept for Bigleaf, I had grown sick of implementing fancy new load balancers and multi-wan routers for customers, just to be disappointed by all the caveats and false promises. Look at the marketing materials for those devices and you’ll see terms like “Seamless Failover”, and “Intelligent QoS”, yet those promises fall empty in almost all cases, except for specific lab environments that aren’t seen in the real world.

Bigleaf is different. We’re passionate about truly providing effective internet optimization. One of the features we use to do that is our patent-pending Dynamic QoS Prioritization. Our QoS implementation is different that others in a number of ways, which we’ll explore in this 2-part blog series. This first post addresses our higher-level philosophical thoughts about QoS, and the 2nd post will be more of a technical deep-dive.

Bigleaf QoS Concepts

Below are the 5 overarching concepts that go into our QoS Prioritization design.

Smart Sacrifice

You will make sacrifices in your network implementation. Cost, reliability, speed, quality, relationships, and a number of other factors influence how you build your internet and cloud connectivity. At Bigleaf we believe that the cloud calls for a new priority ordering of sacrifices. You’re going to spend hundreds, thousands, or more each month on your cloud applications, and you need connectivity that’s worthy of those apps. We built the Bigleaf QoS system to sacrifice a tiny bit of network latency and cost, so that you can see huge gains in reliability and performance. You no longer have to settle for caveats and poor performance.

Internet Path Visibility

To provide effective QoS a network system needs to know about as much of the path as possible between the application and the users. As you move to Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology like Bigleaf, this is even more crucial. Networks can’t adapt to what they can’t see. Application developers are getting more creative about solving network problems via protocols like Multi-Path TCP, however only the network layer can provide QoS Prioritization, so it’s a crucial place to have visibility. Bigleaf extensively monitors the entire path that your traffic takes from your office all the way to our gateway clusters in the core of the internet. No traffic takes other paths, all of your traffic runs along the path that our monitoring traffic uses, so there are no hidden un-monitored “brownouts” or outages for lower priority applications.

Total Control

QoS doesn’t work unless you control all the traffic passing over a network path, in both directions, along the whole path. This is crucial. You can carefully configure QoS on your router or firewall, with lots of complex settings and rules, and not realize that it’s completely ineffective. And it’s really hard to test QoS properly, so you likely won’t even know until your co-workers complain of VoIP quality or other application issues.

Why is this? Here’s why: There are 2 primary traffic protocols on the internet: TCP and UDP. TCP is like a phone conversation, it goes both ways, and if someone’s talking too fast you can tell them and they’ll slow down. UDP is like a TV show, one-way, if they’re talking too fast then you’re out of luck, the show is useless. The only way to provide effective QoS prioritization is to have total control of download and upload traffic, for all protocols, including UDP.

An on-site load balancer, router, or firewall has no control of inbound UDP traffic (yes, their marketing literature is misleading). Some very expensive on-site devices will attempt to control inbound TCP traffic via hacks of the protocol’s return traffic, but this is only part of the traffic flow on the circuit, there’s still uncontrolled UDP traffic that will destroy QoS. It’s like you’re trying to have a phone conversation, but the TV is on really loud so you can’t hear and there’s no way to turn it down.

Bigleaf controls all traffic, TCP, UDP, and every other IP protocol, end-to-end between your office and our gateway clusters. Total Control for real QoS.

A Creative and Evolving Ruleset

Complexity ruins many great intentions. Do you have time to manage QoS rules all day long, or do you need to deal with business-critical work? Yes, it’s fun to geek out at times and tweak knobs and settings, but that fun quickly turns in to a hassle (or outright failure) with typical complex QoS implementations.

We take a different approach: plug and play ease. Our standard ruleset is creative, correctly handling new applications automatically in most cases. And as the ruleset evolves those changes propagate automatically to all sites, so you benefit continually from improvements. If you do need to get geeky to accommodate some esoteric application we can manage that via custom per-site rules, but our standard rules meet almost everyone’s needs well.

Real-time Adaptation

QoS only works when network devices at each end know how fast the network path is. This is a little-known fact, but it’s crucial for effective QoS. Network devices have to manage traffic flowing into a circuit so that the circuit doesn’t become saturated: full of traffic. If circuit saturation occurs then the devices trying to implement QoS are effectively doing nothing, their rules are no longer controlling the network prioritization. Yet almost all network QoS devices are completely naive of changing circuit bandwidth.

When using broadband circuits, or even SLA-backed circuits like T1s or fiber, the speed of the path between your office and the remote destination is often variable. Speed can be affected by issues along the whole path, last-mile, middle-mile and peering problems. Your internet QoS is ineffective if it’s based on a statically set speed.

Our patent-pending QoS implementation is Dynamic – it adapts to changing circuit bandwidths in real time to ensure that high-priority traffic like VoIP and other real-time applications experience true prioritization across the full path from your office to our gateway clusters in the core of the internet.

You Need It All

Without all of the concepts above, correctly implemented, and carefully managed, QoS across the internet is impossible. With Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS you get the best possible experience for your VoIP and Cloud traffic in a simple-to-use service. Please Sign Up for service, or Contact Us with questions.

Check out Part 2 where we dive into some technical details about the above topics.

Feature and Last image by MattysFlicks