Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Some reviewers are being too harsh - this thing is great!, November 2, 2005
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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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Works better than software optimizers, August 31, 2005
Ok...Ok... Im a gaget junkie... my company currently has a split t1 line with the internet running at 386k. (i get speeds up to 500k). i currently have 63 machines networked and using the same internet access point. so you can see my interest in a 'broadband booster'. The installation was easy and quick.
the results i found was.
1: web browsing had partial jumps in speed in loading pages. the over all speed had increased slightly.
2: the outlook express email 'sending and recieving' increased. speeding the time up in obtaining email. (and i get alot of junk mail to prove it).
3: the uploading of files have increased also.
4: using a web based speed test i noticed a decrease in results. but in the actual 'timing' in seconds i noticed a quicker turn around time. it gave me the illusion of a 1100k line. (i have a 3 meg at home and the pages are now loading the same amount of time).
in conclusion:
not knowing what to expect in the savings of time in using the broadband booster i was supprised with the performance. though i did not get the advertised 'up to 400%' increase, i did get a noticable increase and would purchase that same product again.
(i am going to purchase another one for home)
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Improvements when using multiple computers or applications, September 17, 2005
I have seen some improvements, but not the maximum 400% quoted. For example, VoIP quality is maintained, even while uploading or downloading files (before, VoIP would really suffer when sending out large email attachments for example).
The same goes for gaming, latency stays low even while doing file transfers. Don't expect it to do miracles, but especially when you have a network with several computers or you are using several applications at the same time (e.g. VoIP, gaming and file transfers), it will make things run a lot more smoothly than before.
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