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.

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.  

On August 30th, CenturyLink/Level 3 experienced a widespread internet outage lasting nearly 5 hours. This not only impacted their network and their direct customers, but it also affected many other ISPs and services that connected to their network, directly or indirectly.

Each year, there are numerous notable internet disruptions like that one, which can bring businesses to a grinding halt. In just the past few months, Comcast has experienced widespread outage, and AT&T internet service was interrupted or slowed throughout Florida.

Events like these affect every organization that relies on cloud-based applications and video-based communications to maintain day-to-day operations and serve customers. Outages reveal the increased power and indispensability of these tools for business and highlight the importance of internet performance — frequently shining a spotlight on poor WAN performance. This can cost a business even more than the estimated $5,600 per minute that Gartner calculated back in 2014.

While outages are show stoppers, they can still be considered relatively rare. However, jittery VoIP, flaky video calls, or lagging ERP and point-of-sale tools are everyday occurrences, with a significant impact on productivity and the bottom line. Depending on the size and nature your operation, poor network performance can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars per minute.

It is an ongoing challenge for businesses to keep mission-critical operations running smoothly over internet connections, especially as more tools are regularly spun up as needed at the department, team, or even user level without IT involvement. And as adoption of cloud-based applications and SaaS solutions increases, traditional networks become even more complex and difficult to manage. Network engineers and IT teams are increasingly strained by dynamic technology stacks (cloud-based, on-premises, and hybrid) and a workforce that is more geographically dispersed.

Smarter network operations

Bigleaf offers a cloud-first SD-WAN solution that improves network efficiency, optimizes IT resources, and helps you create a more resilient and dependable network for your mission-critical applications.

We make it easy to build a transparent, worry-free network that frees IT teams from cumbersome network management tasks and support calls. With our intelligent software, owned and operated Cloud Access Network, 99.99% SLA-backed uptime, tier one support, and firewall-friendly design, Bigleaf helps IT teams to deliver solid internet and cloud app performance more easily in an uncertain environment.

Bigleaf recognizes that tech stacks constantly evolve. Apps are deployed and retired almost daily because individual users have different requirements. If a webinar presenter is dissatisfied with one video conferencing tool, you can be sure they’ll deploy a different one next time. These types of changes don’t need to be a four-alarm fire that spurs the IT department to make manual SD-WAN configuration changes for QoS and firewall compatibility. Bigleaf’s intelligent solution makes it easy for businesses to scale and adjust to changes, in many cases automatically, while maintaining uptime and performance.

These applications and technologies represent investments that business need to see pay off every day. That requires reliable performance at headquarters, branch offices, and home offices no matter what tools are being used. Bigleaf meets those needs with redundant, dependable SD-WAN that’s smarter than your average network architecture.

By stabilizing the network for the technology that powers your business, you can rest easy knowing VoIP won’t fail during an all-hands conference call, video won’t get jittery or freeze during the next big sales presentation, and sales and inventory transactions will go through every time.

To learn more about Bigleaf’s intelligent networking solution from a real-world perspective, watch this webinar — Creating a resilient network: Q&A with Lionakis IT Director Matthew Onken.

With the sudden, urgent shift to work from home that began in March and the current likelihood that many will continue to work remotely, IT and help desk staff are expanding into new territory. Instead of just on-premise-support, now your IT team is also supporting dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of home offices, each with its own quirks, unique configurations, and unknown hardware.

One of the challenges with supporting remote workers is that they still need to hold meetings, and with today’s amazing advances in internet telephony and video conferencing, using video chat is becoming the new norm. In addition to video conferencing, there are many other business applications vying for support and bandwidth, from file sharing to database access to remote desktops to VPNs. Residential internet connections were not built to simultaneously handle this type of traffic alongside gaming and streaming services all day, especially when aggregated across entire neighborhoods and even rural areas filled with at-home workers.

Supporting home office network connections

Home offices face a number of internet connection challenges. Due to the asymmetry of residential bandwidth, home office network connections tend to have low upstream throughput. Business applications are definitely competing with residential bulk data for their share of that coveted home internet connection.

The wide variety of network devices being used by at-home workers will make it challenging for the IT support staff to be familiar with every configuration and every option available. In this situation, you are reduced to guiding non-technical workers through ping tests over the phone and urging your coworkers to go thumbing through manuals in hopes of finding helpful support information. This is not an ideal situation and is bound to be frustrating for all parties involved.

A configuration option that may be available for remote workers in their home network is Quality of Service, or QoS. This will configure traffic shaping at the network device and can hopefully be used to give priority to specific types of traffic. However, it is important to remember that in residential routers and access points, the QoS settings will typically be limited. It may just be an on/off toggle switch.

Residential hardware is not typically good at identifying a variety of traffic types, which means that while it’s possible to turn QoS support on, it might not actually be addressing the problem. However, some do implement device-level prioritization by MAC or IP address. When available, this could be useful for favoring the work computer over the kid’s tablet.

If the router does have more detailed QoS configuration options, a certain level of technical know-how will likely be needed to make those policy changes. Whether the options are basic or more complex, it’s likely that each of your home workers is using a different model of router and different hardware to connect to the internet. This means IT would have to support an array of devices with different capabilities.

Advanced solutions for the home office

Since the QoS solutions in residential hardware are typically limited, the first solution to come to mind might be to use existing enterprise hardware and repurpose it for the home office. In order for a QoS solution to be able to prioritize business traffic over residential traffic, it needs to be able to do these three things:

1. Identify the source and type of network traffic.
2. Synchronize information across devices.
3. Be aware of the total amount of bandwidth available – in both directions.

Most traditional enterprise QoS solutions can handle the first two requirements just fine, but many don’t have the ability to be aware of throughput or network capacity. They are designed for the consistent business connection, not the shared, fluctuating residential connection. This limits the effectiveness of their traffic shaping capabilities for a residential service.

Fortunately, there are newer QoS technologies such as Bigleaf Network’s Dynamic QoS, which automatically identifies and and applies automated QoS policies to ensure business app traffic is prioritized over other household traffic. Bigleaf also monitors constantly shifting broadband capacity in real time to adjust traffic before key applications drop or lag.

Bigleaf is committed to helping organizations provide their employees with reliable communications, internet access, and application performance in their home offices. Bigleaf Home Office can keep the chaos and unpredictability of residential Internet connections from impacting business communications and applications.

With an easy plug-in, no manual-configuration installation users can do themselves, Bigleaf Home Office can be easily deployed across your team’s home offices. A Bigleaf edge router is sent directly to each home office, and the typical install simply requires it to be plugged in to the existing ISP modem and to a WiFi router without the need for specialized IT resources. The set up works seamlessly with existing ISP and broadband connections, supporting both single and multiple circuits.

Alongside QoS, Bigleaf Home Office offers software-defined networking (SD-WAN) with support for redundant network connections and outage detection outside the home network. Bigleaf utilizes its nationwide Cloud Access Network and gateway clusters to ensure a high-performance connection to the Cloud. You can also remotely view and manage the health of the home office network with the Bigleaf online dashboard, which will make troubleshooting infinitely faster.

Learn more about Bigleaf Home Office.

Bigleaf QoS Concepts, In-Depth

Let’s dive into the details, through all 5 concepts discussed in the previous post.

Smart Sacrifice

Legacy network appliances (routers, firewalls, load-balancers) provide a self-contained device that attempts to provide useful control of traffic at one point in the network path. These devices provide high efficiency (there is no tunneling overhead) and sometimes low cost for basic versions, yet sacrifice in almost every other area. For more details on how they compare, check out this comparison against Bigleaf.

Then there are the newer Software Defined Networking (SDN) entrants in this space such as Bigleaf. Some have adopted the term “SD-WAN” to describe use of SDN across Wide Area Networks (WANs). Unfortunately, just like “Cloud” can mean many things from private VMs to public-facing SaaS services to Hosted VoIP, SDN and SD-WAN are marketing terms that vary widely in meaning. Some use them to describe simple features like cloud-based device administration, while others use them to mean fully separated control/data plane architectures, and everything in between.

So the question you need to ask is, what are the sacrifices or tradeoffs they are making? Buzzwords don’t matter, the experience for your users does. Unlike other offerings, we at Bigleaf sacrifice a little bit of speed and latency for vastly improved reliability, performance, and user experience.

We do this by tunneling all user traffic through our gateway clusters. This means there’s tunnel overhead (typically about 8%) and a geography-dependent latency increase (typically 5-20ms). Internet-based applications don’t even notice the tiny latency increase, and with broadband circuits so prevalent, the tunnel overhead is basically meaningless. However, what this tradeoff gains us is Seamless Failover of all applications, effective QoS across the public internet, and everything else you read about on this website, without caveats.

Internet Path Visibility

Typical load-balancers and firewalls decide if an internet circuit is up or down by pinging Google or some other IP address out the circuit. If the pings go away then the circuit is down.

First issue here: Up or down, on or off, that’s the granularity available. Real-time applications like VoIP and VDI require far more delicate treatment than this, as they are sensitive to even 1% packet loss.

Second issue: Varying internet paths. Thanks to internet routing protocols like BGP, once traffic leaves your office it can take many internet paths, it’s “The Web”! This is a neat tool for viewing how hugely internet paths can vary. Below is a screenshot showing an example of why this is an issue.

The big dot is your ISP, some of those other dots are the stuff you’re trying to interact with on the internet. Notice how there are a gazillion paths? Just because the path to Google is clean, does not mean that path to your business-critical applications is clean, or even up!

So SD-WAN fixes this right? Not in many cases. With most other offerings, the providers will tunnel some of your traffic back to their cloud servers, but not other traffic. This is a huge issue when quality comes in to play. As this visualization shows, the path tunneled back to their cloud datacenter(s) may be clean, while other paths are nasty or even offline.

Here at Bigleaf we recognized that we can’t sacrifice visibility of what the internet is doing to your application traffic. We absolutely have to know what’s going on at all times for all traffic. Because of this, we tunnel all traffic back through our gateway clusters, your traffic and our monitoring traffic. This ensures that we have fine-grained details on performance of the full internet path that your traffic is taking into the core of the internet. With Bigleaf, the path our monitoring traffic takes is the same as almost the entire path to your VoIP provider, to Google, to Salesforce, and everywhere else.

We monitor that path 10 times per second with custom monitoring packets that our on-site router and gateway clusters pass back and forth. This gives our SDN algorithms packet-loss, latency, jitter, and capacity data for each direction along the whole path, updated in real-time.

There is a small portion of the internet path that we don’t fully see and control – the path between our gateway clusters and the endpoints your traffic is flowing to. Typically that path is just a few hops away on the backbone of the internet (which tends to be the most reliable portion), and with many networks it’s only 1 hop away over connections that we control.

Total Control

The state of QoS on most internet-facing routers and firewalls is sadly very broken. Users think they can check an “enable QoS” checkbox, put in a few rules, and have something that works. As mentioned in the previous post, inbound QoS is basically uncontrolled with on-prem-only solutions due to UDP traffic (and often TCP traffic too).

To get around this issue, we implement control at both ends of the internet path. For upload traffic we control everything at our on-premise router, nothing too special there. For download traffic though, we control all traffic in the core of the internet, at our gateway clusters. These gateway clusters are located in carrier hotels, essentially datacenters that are core internet peering points. We operate our own network rather than using cloud providers like Amazon where resources are shared. These decisions ensure that customers have the lowest latency to the endpoints they are trying to reach, and that we have complete autonomy to run the network in a way that provides maximum performance with no compromises.

In our gateway clusters and on-premise routers we classify user traffic into 6 different categories, rate-limit and queue traffic as needed to ensure proper QoS prioritization, and then send it out through our tunnels. Those categories are:

1. VoIP
2. Hi-priority Interactive
3. Med-priority Interactive
4. Low-priority Interactive
5. Bulk Transfers
6. Default

Because this is happening at both ends (your office and the core of the internet), we have full QoS control over almost the entire internet path. When we say that our QoS works you can believe it, and we’re glad to help you test it if you’d like.

A Creative and Evolving Ruleset

The six QoS priorities above are useless without rules to classify traffic into them. There tends to be 3 widely used philosophies to QoS rules:

1. Have none
2. Have none, except for a few specific ones for those really sensitive applications
3. Use Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) for super-fine-grained control with thousands of rules

#1 obviously is no good. #2 is getting better, but there are lots of basics it leaves uncovered. Maybe business critical applications will work OK, but users may hate the rest of their internet and cloud experience. #3 could be effective, but do you want to maintain that, and do you want to pay for hardware powerful enough to run each traffic flow through thousands of rules?

We’ve come up with a better, more creative method. We have a base ruleset that covers almost all applications, not solely with specific rules but also with other methods that identify traffic beyond basic ports and protocols (but without the overhead of DPI). This ruleset provides an excellent experience for almost every customer and application situation.

However, we acknowledge that any fixed ruleset won’t meet every need, and it needs to change over time. That’s one huge benefit of Bigleaf’s SDN technology – it evolves. When we update the ruleset with new optimizations, those get implemented on your service automatically. You get the benefits, with no additional cost or work. And if you need something custom that our base ruleset doesn’t handle then we can also implement custom per-site rules.

Real-time Adaptation

This part is pretty crucial. Without real-time adaptation, nothing described above matters. If the network devices at each end of a path don’t have accurate speeds set, then they can’t buffer traffic and prioritize it – other hops along the path will do that, almost surely without regard to your desired QoS priorities.

Pretty much all routers/firewalls/load-balancers are rather dumb about speeds for QoS. They either assume that the speed or throughput capacity of a given network path is equivalent to the speed of the port that it’s connected to (e.g. a 100Mbps ethernet port), or that if a speed is set in the UI for the port (e.g. 40Mbps) that the speed will never change. Internet paths are often congested though. Cable circuits experience heavy congestion in the last-mile. DSL and Ethernet-Over-Copper circuits often experience middle-mile backhaul congestion, and all circuits are prone to varying bandwidth due to network failures and peering congestion.

So how should this be fixed? We spent a lot of time back when we started Bigleaf working on this problem, because it’s not easy to solve. A few SDN-type solutions run a bandwidth test at boot-up or device set-up to evaluate the circuit throughput. The problem with that is that throughput changes! Consider a typical 50M/10M Cable circuit. At varying times it may have capacity like this:

• 6AM: 50M/10M
• 9AM: 43M/6M
• 2PM: 47M/7M
• 8PM: 39M/9M

Theoretically you could just set the QoS rate-limiting settings to 39M/6M for this circuit and have success, but what if you set it wrong? And what about all the bandwidth you’re wasting during better times? That’s not good enough for us.

We created a patent-pending mechanism that automatically adjusts the QoS rate-limiting settings as circuit capacity changes. This ensures that for both download and upload, you get the most possible speed from each internet circuit, without sacrificing constant QoS that’s always prioritizing traffic, even during times of ISP congestion. Our devices at each end are the only devices buffering traffic along the path, so we control the QoS priority.

QoS is One (big) Piece of the Bigleaf Solution

If an ISP circuit is so congested that there’s no “clean” bandwidth available, there’s just constant packet-loss, heavy latency, or bad jitter, then we’ll move your traffic off that circuit using our Intelligent Load Balancing. But for most situations Dynamic QoS is a game-changing feature that enables effective use of over-the-top services like VoIP and VDI across the public internet.

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Header image by Ministerio TIC Colombia
Last image by MattysFlicks

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

Yes, you can!

Bigleaf can do 3 powerful things across even a single connection:

• Provide QoS prioritization
• Enable in-depth monitoring and alerting
• Simplify ISP changes

Check out this 5 minute video for all the details

As I have mentioned in the past, Bigleaf has some really smart people on the team. They also have me – a salesperson. Most of the time, our smart people are doing smart things to make Bigleaf better. However, they also spend some quality time, explaining how we do what we do to me – a salesperson.

So, in honor of their efforts, I want to share what they’ve taught me about what makes Bigleaf unique, in terms a sales person can use. If you want a more technical overview of each feature, click on the feature name.

Same IP Address Failover

This mean not only does outbound traffic leverage both connections, but inbound traffic does too. With Same IP Address Failover, a VoIP call or VPN pointed at a public IP address can be moved from one circuit to the other without interrupting the session. The customer could be in the middle of a phone call, lose one of their internet connections to a failure, and still keep the call up and running without interruption.

Intelligent Load Balancing

This is about maximizing performance and value of both the customers Internet connections and their cloud-based applications. Though many people like the idea of a redundant Internet connection, nobody likes paying for something they hope to never use. With Intelligent Load Balancing, not only do we eliminate the idea of redundancy, we make sure that customers are using always each Internet connection for its ideal purpose. We match each type of customer traffic to whichever circuit is best for that type of traffic at the exact moment. No more primary and secondary circuits, just optimized Internet and maximized value.

Dynamic QoS

This is the game changer when we talk to VoIP providers. For years VoIP providers have had to face the dilemma of provisioning services via private circuits or Over-the-Top of a customers existing Internet circuit(s). Private circuits ensured quality and performance because the provider could use QoS. However, the expense of these private circuits significantly increased their service delivery costs. Conversely, Over-the-Top provisioning kept the providers price point down to a competitive level, but sacrificed QoS and its performance benefits. With Dynamic QoS, that dilemma disappears. Bigleaf can provide Over-the-Top value with QoS performance.

Plug-and-Play Provisioning

Don’t get me wrong, we come from the telco world and know how important field techs the entire Internet ecosystem. They are great people, who work really hard. However, it’s nice to not have to always rely on them. It’s nice to know our customers agree. Bigleaf is ready to work right out of the box. There is no need for to dispatch a tech or have a “certified” engineer involved in our installation process. Each Bigleaf router comes with a 2-page, each to follow, install guide. The entire process was designed with me in mind. If I can install it, then we are success. So, if you can plug in an Ethernet cord, you should yourself a “Bigleaf Certified” installer.

So there you have the sales perspective on what the smart guys have taught me. If you are more interested in what the smart guys have to say, please link from each feature to on overview page, or even better give us a call. They’d love to chat!