Networking

QoS

Also called: Quality of Service, DSCP marking

Switch and router configuration that prioritises latency-sensitive traffic — audio, video, voice — over bulk traffic when a link gets congested.

Real-time media is unforgiving: a backup job saturating an uplink will make a Dante room stutter and a call drop even though total bandwidth looks fine. QoS marks media packets and services them first, which is why audio-over-IP vendors specify DSCP values rather than leaving it to chance.

QoS only works end to end. Marking traffic at the AV switch and losing the marking at the core is the same as having no QoS, so the whole path — including any SD-WAN or ISP handoff — needs to honour it consistently.

Related terms

Dante: An audio-over-IP protocol that carries multichannel digital audio across standard Ethernet, replacing individual analog runs between microphones, DSPs, and amplifiers.
VLAN: A logical network segment on shared physical switching, used to isolate device groups — cameras, AV, guest Wi-Fi, corporate data — from each other.
SD-WAN: A WAN architecture that pools multiple circuits — fibre, cable, LTE — under software control, steering each application over the best available path and failing over automatically.

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