Quality of Service (QoS): Configuring Your Firewall to Prioritize Voice Traffic

Voice traffic on an organization’s local area network is similar to data traffic in that it is transmitted as packets over different devices. The main difference between data and voice traffic is that data traffic has the ability to resend information if it initially gets lost in transit. Voice traffic, on the other hand, cannot resend information because the packets must be received in order as a continual stream for the information to make sense. As such, the way voice packets are treated in your network will have a significant effect on your call quality.

We recommend configuring your network such that voice traffic has a higher priority than data traffic. (See graphic below). This will ensure that issues related to voice packets are minimized and that your calls have optimal audio quality without having a noticeable effect on your data traffic. Traffic prioritization can be configured in a variety of ways, but we suggest prioritizing packets based on the IP addresses listed below. Please reach out to your organization’s network / IT team to determine the best way to set up traffic prioritization. If you do not have an IT team you can reach out to your internet provider to see if prioritization can be configured on your network.

If you want to prioritize voice traffic on your local area network, you can set up QoS rules using the following media server IP addresses. Doing so is optional, although we do recommend it.

We recommend you set up all of them, regardless of your location. Our service uses Global Low Latency routing to select the data center with the lowest-latency.