You do, however, appreciate that the real intelligence resides under the hood. That's the idea behind CiscoAssure Policy Networking, an initiative from Cisco that includes a QoS policy server. Cisco recognized that administrators needed management tools that would automate much of the lower-level configuration and maintenance duties of QoS management. With CiscoAssure, management is moved away from the CLI to a policy-based paradigm. The resulting QoS configuration is automated through the policy network system.
Pertinent devices adjust their configurations to reflect the new policy.
In properly designated networks, LANs do not experience significant link congestion. However, congestion may occur in transmit buffers of routers or switches. Therefore, QoS mechanisms in the LAN are useful for buffer management, while QoS mechanisms in the WAN are useful for optimizing expensive resources by improving link efficiency, reducing delay and jitter for delay-sensitive applications, and prioritizing some applications above others. In the wide area, where bandwidth is precious and delay is often significant, more QoS is needed. This, therefore, would be reflected in the corresponding QoS sophistication of the corresponding products.