QoS stands for Quality of Services and is a method to prioritize/penalize predefined types of traffic. It is a fairly complex topic so we'll try to hover over the basic principles so that an initial setup can be performed. QoS in a nutshell performs the following:
The above list you might have heard elsewhere refers to a so called diffserv (differential services) which is the only QoS type possible with FreshTomato. On the first page of every QoS book/material you read you should find something that sounds like this:
QoS is technique to mitigate lack of bandwidth where an upgrade is too costly or simply not possible.
Truth, but to be precise QoS also allows you to prioritize latency-sensitive traffic (e.g. voice) even if no congestion is experienced. Essentially QoS introduces control, this allows to protect certain traffic.
Let's familiarize ourselves with some basic terms now:
Ever experienced a poor VoIP call from your LAN into Internet? Do you get media buffering too much? Is anyone in your LAN generating too much traffic? These are all things QoS can address for you. Please notice: QoS is NOT auto-regulating, you will need to define manually most of the parameters and tweak them as needed throughout time.
QoS doesn't work when CTF is enabled, because CTF causes network packets to be routed in hardware, outside of firmware control or monitoring.