[j-nsp] QoS when there is no congestion

[Eric Van Tol]

> Yeah YMMV indeed, as your approach works only in one of the three cases
> below:
> 1) Your network is not connected to the Internet.
> 1) Your network is connected to the Internet, but all traffic on your
> network is best effort.
> 3) Your network is connected to the Internet, but the sum of traffic that
> can ingress your network from the Internet is less than the capacity of the
> smallest link on your network.

My opinion on QoS for networks with low bandwidth is to always implement it. It's really not that difficult and you never know when microbursts could be affecting things. Believe me, even if your upstream link is a 1Gb/s circuit, and your outbound traffic is less than 10Mb/s, you can still have drops due to microbursts.

Voice and video, depending on your use of them, are normally very important and very sensitive to drops/delays. It will never cost you anything (besides time) to learn to implement some simple QoS policies, however, if you have customers who complain about bad voice/video quality, it will cost you your reputation and possibly revenue when said customers cancel their contracts because of a service you cannot reliably provide.

-evt