It's a little odd to need to do QOS on a local subnet - is your bandwidth on the local subnet that utilized?

Seriously - on a local subnet you should have plenty of bandwidth and not require QOS as much as you seem to. I'd really be interested in seeing a network diagram. Especially in a switched network - switching is at wire speed - the only bottleneck would be the two end devices in a communication unless your switch's backplane was maxed out.

Wayne,

I used Linksys for years and loved it then had a switch go out on me. First lost one port then another and so on. Called Linksys and they were worthless, it was 3 weeks over the 1 year warranty period and they told me to F/O and die (buy another one). Switched all my stuff to Netgear and its worked for several years with no problems.

Still use the Linksys switch on my TiVo unit. One port still works and thats all thats needed but when it dies will replace it with one from a company who stands behind their product. I believe that Linksys is a good product but I cannot support someone who does not support the customer.

JoeA

So... the VPN is to your office I assume and the VOIP traffic is over that VPN via the DSL link.

My questions are these: Are you sure that this will fix your problem or will it just be added expense that doesn't. More research is needed to be sure before you spend the money. Plus - I still don't think a switch is your answer I think a proper router is as your problem isn't on the local subnet - it's the connection between the office and the home - namely the DSL link and your 4.5Mbit internet connection at work.

I think you need to set up some traffic monitoring to see how much bandwidth you're using at home becuase if the link is saturated then you'll need to address that before you lock things down with QOS. While QOS may make things better - if you haven't got enough bandwidth then spending this money isn't going to help.

Other questions - what is your router at the office, what is providing your VPN services (please dear god don't say windows). If you're using a Cisco Router at the office and it is also providing your VPN services it is possible that you could do the QOS at that point in your network (since when you are connected to the VPN essentially all your traffic will go to that device before it goes anywhere else) and thus not be required to do QOS at your home location and not have to spend any additional money.

I have a little experience with this (try something like 10 years now) so I would be happy to help.

Well - unless you do a hardware VPN solution at your house to connect to the office then you really have to do the QOS at the office on the VPN device.

The reason is that if you use the PC to initiate the VPN connection the device that is providing connectivity is not going to see the VOIP traffic as it will be wrapped in a VPN tunnel packet. IT won't know how to provide QOS to it as a VOIP packet in that case due to the tunnel. IF you use a hardware device then it could possibly work as the device will see the traffic from the Phone application before it tunnels it out to your office.

Still - a switch isn't the answer - even if you buy a switch with these features you're buying a "multiylayer switch." Switches work on layer 2 - which is the network layer - the packet layer. They don't route via IP or any other protocol they switch packets based on mac address from one port to another simplistically speaking. A multilayer switch provides a 3rd or even higher funtionality by putting a routing ability into the switch. Layer 3 is IP and requires routing to transport. I'll try to draw up a diagram today showing you what I mean.