Connect. Secure. Manage.
Cisco WAN Quality of Service
Design Cisco WAN QoS policies around business traffic, circuit behaviour and supported queuing features, then validate them under realistic load.
Devices supported
across the UK
Client locations
supported
Traffic handled
at peak time
Average
response time
Average response is not a resolution time or a contractual guarantee. Support scope and response commitments are agreed for each engagement.
Cisco WAN Quality of Service helps a constrained connection give appropriate treatment to different kinds of traffic. It does not create bandwidth or repair an unreliable circuit. MCI Network Services designs and reviews Cisco WAN QoS policies around the applications, circuit behaviour and hardware actually in use. The purpose is to protect important traffic during contention without creating a complicated policy that nobody can explain or safely maintain.
The whole path
Understand how sites, providers, cloud networks and security controls fit together.
Resilience that can be tested
Separate a second circuit from genuine end-to-end service resilience.
Provider coordination
Keep addressing, routing and escalation ownership clear across organisations.
Translate business priorities into traffic requirements
The starting point is a conversation about work, not queue numbers. We identify applications that are sensitive to delay, variation or loss and distinguish them from transfers that can complete more slowly. Voice, interactive business systems, bulk replication and ordinary browsing do not all need the same treatment. The customer approves priorities before technical classification is introduced.
We also establish the traffic direction and the point at which congestion occurs. A policy on an outbound interface may help traffic leaving a site but cannot directly control a provider’s inbound queue. Where both directions require protection, the design may need provider cooperation or changes at the remote endpoint. We state that boundary explicitly rather than promising end-to-end priority from one local configuration.
Standards & partnerships
Confidence in the team behind your network.
Cisco Partner
Cisco Meraki
Cyber Essentials
Cyber Essentials PlusMCI Network Services is operated by Proxar Ltd. Certifications apply to the certified legal entity and the scope of its certificates. View accreditation information
Classify traffic using reliable evidence
Traffic classification can use supported application recognition, addresses, ports and existing markings, depending on the platform and design. We check the limitations of each method. Encrypted applications, shared hosting and changing service endpoints can make simplistic port-based rules inaccurate. A classification scheme needs a maintenance owner as well as an initial configuration.
Trust boundaries are equally important. Accepting every endpoint’s priority marking can allow an incorrectly configured device to place ordinary traffic in a protected class. We decide where markings are trusted, verified or rewritten. The resulting class map is small enough to audit and tied to documented application requirements, avoiding a proliferation of special cases that compete for the same limited resources.
A useful starting point
Not sure where to start?
Bring the requirement. We will help you define the engineering work.
Match shaping to the delivered service
The Ethernet interface speed is not necessarily the usable circuit rate. A provider may police a service below the physical handoff speed or account for encapsulation differently. We review the contracted rate, actual throughput and relevant overhead before choosing a shaping policy. Otherwise, traffic may reach a provider’s drop point before the customer’s queues have a chance to manage contention.
Cisco platform capabilities and software releases affect which queueing and hierarchical policies are supported. We verify the intended configuration against the device rather than transplanting commands from an unrelated router. Parent shaping, child classes and bandwidth allocation need to work together. The design records any platform constraints so that later equipment replacement does not silently change the service behaviour.
Different environments. The same care.
Built around the work
your network supports.
Finance, banking and the wider private sector. We start with the systems and people that depend on your connections.
Finance & banking
Market-data paths, routing and provider coordination on clients’ behalf.
Financial-market services ↗Offices & multi-site teams
Reliable access between people, workplaces and business applications.
Office network design ↗Data centres & cloud
Network boundaries, workload connections and operational ownership.
Data centre networks ↗Allocate protected capacity without starving other work
Priority treatment should be proportionate to the expected application load. A poorly bounded priority class can damage other essential services when traffic is misclassified or demand grows. We calculate reasonable allocations, examine the behaviour of unused bandwidth and decide how excess traffic will be treated. These decisions are documented in terms the operations team can review.
Important background services also need consideration. Authentication, DNS, routing and management traffic may be small in volume but significant during an incident. We do not assume that everything outside the voice class is expendable. The policy should support a workable business service at the available capacity, including a clear plan for traffic that cannot fit during a severe degradation.
Test under realistic contention
An idle circuit proves little about queue behaviour. We agree a controlled test or observation period that includes representative competing traffic. Measurements cover the protected application’s experience, queue counters, drops and the effect on other classes. Tests are limited and authorised so that performance validation does not become an unplanned load attack against production.
We compare results before and after the change and check both normal and backup paths. A secondary circuit may have a very different rate or encapsulation, requiring a suitable policy rather than the primary circuit’s settings. For Meraki-connected environments, we distinguish the available traffic-shaping controls from Cisco CLI QoS features instead of implying that the two platforms expose identical mechanisms.
Provide a policy the team can operate
The handover includes class definitions, trusted markings, shaping assumptions, verification steps and a rollback procedure. Monitoring should reveal changes in class demand and persistent drops without treating every dropped low-priority packet as a service failure. Periodic review is particularly useful after new applications, major endpoint changes or circuit upgrades.
MCI can assess an existing policy, design QoS for a WAN refresh or investigate why prioritisation is not producing the expected result. Our wider WAN performance service helps determine whether QoS is the right intervention in the first place. You receive an evidence-based recommendation that distinguishes policy improvements from problems that require more capacity, a different route or provider remediation.
Talk to a specialist
What does your network need next?
Tell us what you are planning, changing or trying to improve. We will help define a practical next step and the engineering scope.
+44 203 196 6566Choose option 1
sales@proxar.co.ukUK-wide service.
Most of our engineers are based in Kent, with a focus on London, Sussex, Essex and Berkshire.
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