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Hawking Technology
Broadband Booster

     The broadband router is a hot selling item, right? This would lead me to believe that there are a lot of households out there with more than one computer. To put things into perspective, when Windows 3.1 was the dominant operating system, there was a real push to put a computer into every home. At that time, statistics showed that only 1 out of every 10 households owned some type of computer. Fast forward 10 years to the present and we haven't quite realized that vision just yet,  but the number of households that do own a computer is definitely up. It is speculated for every 60,000 homes, only one will NOT have a computer. I would like to see some statistical data that shows how many households have more than one computer.

     Whether it's for a Small Office/Home office kind of environment, or simply to keep the rest of the family off of your computer. The reasons aren't really important. What is important is providing a means so that everyone can get online at the same time. This is where buying the router comes into play. With very little post-installation administration, everything runs smooth the majority of the time. After all, it doesn't take a whole lot of bandwidth to pull a few web pages down. Even if everyone is surfing at the same time. Now imagine this scenario: a 3 computer LAN -- Computer #1 is downloading a service pack from Microsoft, Computer #2 is streaming a music video from Yahoo, and Computer #3 is trying to play Quake IV online. It doesn't matter what kind of broadband connection you have, this kind of activity is going to cause some lag.  Why would it when the average high speed packages reach upwards of 3 megabit download rates?  The problem isn't bandwidth, it's how the packets are organized when they leave or enter your router.

     A typical router isn't' designed to optimize the traffic going through it. Instead, a router's main selling points are how secure the firewall's stateful packet inspection is going to make your LAN. A router does nothing to improve the quality of service going from it to the modem. Likewise, the modem is simply getting your requests from the router and putting it out on The Web. It's also getting all those signals back and handing them off to the router so it can inspect them for security and then hand them off to the machine that requested them.