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Quality of Service (QoS) is a method to prioritize/penalize predefined types of traffic. QoS is a fairly complex topic so we'll cover only enough basic principles to help configure an initial setup.
Basically, QoS performs the following:
You might have heard the above points when describing “diffserv” (differential services). Diffserv is the only QoS type FreshTomato can perform.
It's often said that the QoS is a technique to mitigate lack of bandwidth when an upgrade is too costly or even impossible. More precisely, QoS also allows you to prioritize latency-sensitive traffic (such as voice) even when there's no network congestion. Thus, QoS introduces controls to allows you to protect certain traffic.
Here is some commonly used QoS terminology:
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.