Quality of Service, or “QoS”, is a type of setting within internet routers that controls the traffic of devices (like phones and game consoles) and services (movies and web browsers) running on your network at your home or office. What Quality of Service does is it prioritizes the traffic from these devices and services. So for example, by managing your QoS settings, you can tell your router to give higher priority to movies than to gaming. This would allow movies to come in with high quality, but if there was any limitation of bandwidth, it would show up on the quality of the game’s performance.
The reason QoS is important for your RingRx service, is that if “internet voice” services are not prioritized properly in your router, your audio quality can suffer. This can be true even if you have a fast internet connection and are not using many other services. QoS minimizes the random nature of data coming across your network.
The best test to see if QoS is an issue is if you are able to get strong audio quality when on cellular data, but poor audio quality when on wifi.
What do do?
The first step is to check your router to see if it has QoS as a feature. Not all routers do have this feature, although most high quality routers do have it.
The next step is to add a QoS rule for “VOIP” or “internet phone” or something similar. Consult your router’s manual for instructions.
This is admittedly a step many people are not comfortable with. So, if you need any help, please reach out to us for assistance at support@ringrx.com and we will do our best to guide you.
If your router does not support QoS, your best bet is to buy a new router. We recommend the following (when buying, make sure you get the model appropriate for your size and other networking needs)
External Resources
Here are some very good articles on QoS and phone service:
https://www.voipmechanic.com/qos-for-voip.htm
https://www.lifewire.com/quality-of-service-qos-3426725