Hawking Broadband Booster (HBB1) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Pros: Works as advertised - makes better use of limited upstream bandwidth.
Cons: A bit black-boxy. Not a whole lot of info out there on how it works - some reviewers test it all wrong.
Despite the lack of solid information, I took the plunge and got one - and I'm glad I did. In my opinion, this is the most innovative home networking product I've seen since the first broadband router came out.
Installation was a breeze - all you do is hook it up. It is the size of a deck of cards with 3 connections (network in, network out and a tiny transformer). Plug it in and it tests your upstream line speed. About 30 seconds later, the 4 lights come on and the thing is up and running.
One thing Hawking did which is really nice, is the last LED goes from green (indicating standard traffic) to bright, super intense blue when the booster does something to optimize the network traffic. Let me tell you, once it is plugged in, you'd be surprised how much that light stays blue.
What this thing does is to prioritize outgoing traffic. Outgoing, you say. Who cares, right? That's what I said until I hooked this thing up. The small, outgoing broadband upstream pipe (usually 128k - 384k) is pretty overloaded with all the Internet-aware applications we're all running these days, and the pipe gets used pretty inefficiently.
The official press states that the booster prioritizes the traffic, so more "time sensitive" requests such as voice-over-IP, gaming and certain UDP packets are sent out first. Bumped to the bottom are the HTTP web page requests, FTP traffic and so forth. This is seems to do as advertised.
What was not advertised (and was quite surprising) is what happened when only ONE machine is on the network. We turned on my wife's computer and she connected to work via a Citrix connection - which is always extremely slow even when noone else is on the network. I shut down all the other machines on the network to ensure it was as slow as normal, then I installed the booster. When she reconnected, the booster's little blue light came on and hardly went out. The remote session became as responsive as working with a non-remote machine! Three days later, she is still happy. Now I'm just guessing, but it seems as if the booster is not only prioritizing, but is actually combining the barrage of small, outgoing packets of data into larger ones.
I didn't go crazy and bog down the network with a ton of artificial activity - plenty of other folks have tried that. I did fire up two more machines with browsers and my XBox Live. They had no effect on the Citrix session and my XBox Live session (voice and gaming) seemed a bit more zippy than normal.
A friend at work did some similar tests on his network and was equally blown away by the results.
Bottom line... I'd whole-heartily recommend this to anyone who:
1. Has more than one machine running on their home network. I'm guessing it would help a lot if you had kids doing any sort of file sharing.
2. Has a single machine performing a lot of Internet-related activity that you want prioritized (e.g. FTP's to the back of the line).
3. Anyone who runs remote connections a lot - I will definitely be recommending this to folks at work that complain about slow Citrix and Remote Desktop connections.

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