SkyRider’s broadband connections support high-speed IP/Ethernet transport. All SkyRider networks support data, voice and video simultaneously in a converged environment. The network supports Quality of Service (QOS), which prioritizes the voice, data and video traffic on the WAN for efficient bandwidth utilization. SkyRider networks can be configured to honor both 802.1q VLAN ID and 802.1p based QOS. Packets are prioritized into four secure queues; strict or fair prioritization algorithms can be configured.

Three basic levels of end-to-end QoS are provided as shown in the figure below:

Best-effort service—Also known as lack of QoS, best-effort service is basic connectivity with no guarantees. This is best characterized by FIFO queues, which have no differentiation between flows.

Differentiated service (also called soft QoS)—Some traffic is treated better than the rest (faster handling, more average bandwidth, and lower average loss rate). This is a statistical preference, not a hard and fast guarantee. This is provided by classification of traffic and the use of QoS tools such as PQ, CQ, WFQ, and WRED.

Guaranteed service (also called hard QoS)—This is an absolute reservation of network resources for specific traffic. This is provided through QoS tools RSVP and CBWFQ.

Return to SkyRider School & Government WANs page.