What Is VoIP QoS & How It Boosts Call Quality?

What is the biggest worry for businesses that are considering starting to use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) instead of traditional analog phones? The quality of calls made through the internet.

Indeed, when choosing a VoIP provider for business, reliability is key, accounting for 69.5% of what influences a buyer’s decision.

Curious about VoIP QoS (Quality of Service) and how it enhances call quality? Read on to find out.

Key Takeaways

• VoIP QoS is crucial to prevent issues like packet loss and latency, ensuring smooth communication during peak network usage, especially for video calls.
• QoS involves processes like classification, marking, shaping, and queueing of data packets, prioritizing real-time data like voice and video for smoother transmission.
• Best practices include choosing a reliable provider, using wired connections, and monitoring network performance, ensuring optimal call quality and user experience.

What is the Quality of Service for VoIP?

QoS manages data packets to prioritize important ones,  reducing packet loss, jitter, and latency. 

Why Does VoIP QoS Matter?

During a regular workday, multiple employees use the same internet connection for different work-related tasks and personal reasons. You most likely also have dozens of devices connected to the internet at any one time. If everyone starts to use the internet simultaneously or there’s someone on the connection using up a lot of bandwidth (let’s say, updating databases), the network can get pretty crowded. 

What might happen if you tried to start a regular or video call during that time without VoIP QoS? 

You may have to deal with the video buffering every few seconds, listening to jumbled-up sentences, or not even hearing a sound. And that’s assuming you manage to get connected to the recipient at all.

It’s like trying to have a smooth conversation in a crowded room where everyone is talking at once – it’s difficult to hear clearly and communicate effectively.

How Does VoIP QoS Work?

Imagine that the network through which your data travels is like a busy highway. All the data we send, whether it’s a text message, an image, or a video call, is like cars traveling on that highway. 

QoS is like a traffic control system on that highway. It organizes cars (data packets) into different lanes (queues) based on how important they are once they pass the router. Once they are organized by queues and it knows what type of data is inside each one, it arranges them based on their importance.

The great thing is that you can customize the system to prioritize certain types of data. For example, if you set it up to prioritize packets related to audio or video calls, whenever you make a call, those packets jump to the front of the line thanks to the QoS system. This ensures that even during peak network traffic, your calls remain smooth and uninterrupted.

This, in turn, helps to ensure that conversations can flow without any interruptions.

A Typical VoIP QoS Process 

To smoothly manage incoming network traffic and quickly find out what’s in each data packet, QoS systems have several in-built tools with specific functions:

• Classification and marking examines the type of data inside each packet, classifies them, and marks them according to their priority.
• Shaping finds and prioritizes real-time data packets such as voice and video conferencing over other data types.
• Queueing identifies each data packet’s markings, puts them into different types of queues, and reserves bandwidth for them. Those that are not high priority are put into a buffer to be sent later.

Boost Call Quality with VoIP QoS Components

QoS consists of 6 key components that address specific issues and offer significant benefits for your calls: