I can't comment on backbone technology, but it's common for network devices to provide Differentiated Services, which is a traffic-type classifier and QoS syste

I can't comment on backbone technology, but it's common for network devices to provide Differentiated Services, which is a traffic-type classifier and QoS system. They're needed to keep your FTP traffic from lagging your VOIP call. The only reason these wouldn't be used on backbones is if there's simply too much traffic to classify fast enough, but I don't think that's the case. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiated_services http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiated_services