Content

| 8.1 |  | Quality of Service Requirements |
| 8.1.6 |  | Provisioning |

It may be surprising that bandwidth is not listed as an element of QoS. Inadequate bandwidth inflates latency as packets spend increasing amounts of time queued in network devices. In seriously congested networks, inadequate bandwidth results in loss of data as queues overflow. It is impossible to meet QoS requirements if network LAN and WAN links have insufficient bandwidth. Adding bandwidth, also known as over-provisioning, will not solve the problem. The possibility of an over-provisioned network becoming congested is reduced. If it does become congested, the network may not perform as well as a lower bandwidth, lower cost network that makes use of sophisticated QoS features.