VoIP Priority Shaping (Useful with large bandwidth/small office?)
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I have 100mbit fiber at our office 10-15 phones of which ~8 at most being used at one time same with workstations at worst some youtube watching. With a small office like this should I even bother with traffic shaping? So far it's been perfect but I'm soon implementing VPN and a couple of remote users, light database transactions and some PDFs (again not a lot). The wizard looks like it'll do the trick if needed but:
My question is Anyone have experience in a similar small office environment? Thanks for any advice ;D
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Shaping will generally do nothing until there are queuing decisions to be made, which happens when your bandwidth cap set in the shapers is reached and something must be queued or dropped to make room available for higher-priority traffic.
You might want to figure out how to match your VOIP traffic and put it into something simple like PRIQ. Then you'll be a step ahead of any future congestion.
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The internet is very bursty, which can add to jitter. One of the nifty things that Google et al have done is added bursting to TCP to help combat latency and slow-start. It is common for TCP windows to start at 10 or greater. With 1500 byte segments, that's almost 15KiB of data. Now throw in browsers trying to load over several connections at the same time, like 10. You're now up to about 150KiB of data that can be bursted at you with 10Gb/s+ rates. That's about 12ms of data at 100Mb/s.
Maybe it won't matter in your situation, but I would be very aware of transient issues that could make your VoIP have issues that are perceptible to humans, but difficult to measure as issues like with IMCP
