A systems administrator is troubleshooting issues with audio lag during phone conferences. When looking at the core switch, the administrator notices its buffers are consistently full, and packets are

Audio compression reduces bandwidth consumption but does not address priority queuing at the switch, so buffers would still fill and packets would still be dropped during congestion.

QoS (Quality of Service) allows administrators to classify VoIP traffic and assign it higher priority in the switch's queuing mechanism. This ensures voice packets are forwarded before lower-priority data packets during congestion, preventing drops that cause audio lag. It is a software-based configuration that resolves the issue within existing hardware constraints.

Verifying gateway uplink saturation addresses a WAN-side bottleneck, not the core switch buffer issue that is already identified as the source of packet drops.

An IPS exception for voice traffic removes inspection overhead but does not change how the switch queues or prioritizes VoIP packets relative to other traffic.