Transmission of Delay Sensitive Data Over Non- QoS Enabled WANs

Vendors of Voice Over IP (VOIP) and other delay sensitive systems have always marketed their products with the stipulation that performance could be drastically affected unless end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms were in place to guarantee delivery under minimum latency and jitter conditions. For Wide Area Network (WAN) services, this usually means transmission over a single vendor, QoS enabled, MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) private network. Broadband and dedicated Ethernet Internet connections provide a cost effective alternative to expensive, single vendor QoS enabled MPLS private networks. The caveat to using these services is that there is no QoS guarantee and all traffic is treated as best effort.