Describe How Background Traffic Affects Both E-Mail Data and Voip Data
2. (40 points) In college-level paragraph(s), describe how background traffic affects both e-mail data and VoIP data. As a Network engineer you will often wonder about email and VoIP data. Throughout your career you will get a chance to troubleshoot as well as configure protocols pertaining to Email and VoIP data. Both email and VoIP are important to a company without the two, a company will have a hard time communicating as well as have a hard time competing in today’s business world. Throughout this essay I will also get the chance to talk about bandwidth, QOS (Quality of Service) and how it pertains to email and VoIP data. I will have the chance to explain and describe how background traffic affects both e-mail data and VoIP data. Bandwidth, according to the website webopedia bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. For digital devices, the bandwidth is usually expressed in bits per second or bytes per second. For analog devices, the bandwidth is expressed in cycles per second, or Hertz. The main reason traffic is affected is because it takes up a lot of bandwidth to come through clear. For example, let’s say you have a 1.5 Meg T1, which is fine for a voice calls using the proper codec, but throw a video download on that line, along with some email downloads, while trying to make a call and it will slow everything down. In order to have everything working properly the network engineer would have to use QOS (Quality of Service). About.com defined QOS as a board collection of networking technologies and techniques. About.com also states the goal of QOS is to provide guarantees on the ability of a network to deliver predictable results. Both email and VoIP are bandwidth hogs if you don't use QOS on your network it will literally bring your network to a crawl if you aren't using codec’s to compress and QOS. A good way to eliminate this problem is to add VLAN’s. VLANs help prioritize the network traffic by separating