Chances are, everyone on your intranet has Gigabit Ethernet, with its 1,000 Mbps (Megabit per second) speeds. Or perhaps your laptop users are moving up to 802.11n Wi-Fi with 100Mbps throughput. That’s all great — but once your users hit the router, they’re all back to fighting over your far-more limited Internet connection (say, a 44.6 Mbps T3 line). That’s where traffic management comes in.
There are many ways to make sure your YouTube fans don’t eat up your Internet bandwidth. For example, Extreme Network switches, F5 Networks’ BIG-IP network traffic managers, and many other high-end network devices can help you get a grip on how much unnecessary traffic goes to the Internet. But, now Microsoft has built in a new, easy way to manage network traffic in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2: URL Quality of Service (QoS)-based traffic management.
Windows has long had QoS traffic management that used applications, IP addresses, and port numbers to determine which traffic got priority. Now you can set priority by website address. This way, all a network administrator need do is set up policies by website, instead of digging around for IP addresses, which may change over time. So, for example, you could set the Wall Street Journal’s site to have a high-priority while locking down ESPN.
