.

Hawking Technology
Broadband Booster

     Hawking Technologies has teamed with Ubicom to make this....

     The Hawking Technology, HBB1 - Broadband Booster. This is nothing like the a software solution that you download and install. Software solutions basically act like a giant cache system and download chunks of the web pages (such as all the pictures, buttons, and icons) you visit most often. Then, the next time you visit a cached page all the pictures and other cached data is pulled from your hard drive instead of the web page, saving you download time. This gives the illusion of boosting your connection speed, but in reality nothing has changed.

     The HBB1 is much different! It uses a silicone based technology known as Stream Engine which is developed by a company called Ubicom. We attended a presentation with Ubicom at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, in which they showcased many of their present and near future technologies. Hawking Technology has partnered with Ubicom to produce the HBB1. The Stream Engine processor can be thought of an optimizer, which groups and aligns packets in an intelligent manner - much like a defrag program for you hard drive. Since the packets are grouped in a more intelligent fashion, applications spend less time waiting for the next packet to be received, or sent.

     Remember, your router isn't doing anything to optimize the packets. Large file downloads from high volume servers, online gaming, and media streaming all present a very large flood of packets. Keep in mind, a download isn't JUST a download and that goes for media streaming as well. Your computer still has to send an acknowledge stamp to the server sending your file or stream. So there is always data going in both directions. Online gaming, produces the biggest flood of packets hitting your router. This high volume of data can cause clogs that the concurrent media stream and downloads (from our scenario) would have to fight through. That's where the HBB1 comes in with Stream Engine. Stream Engine analysis the packets going in and out and arranges them to maximize the throughput of your connection. Exactly how does Stream Engine works? I will reserve that for a more technical discussion, but for now a trip to the Ubicom website and a view of their Stream Engine page can give you a little bit of insight. Let's just do some testing and analysis with the Broadband Booster and see if it really works.

     As the above picture shows, the HBB1 Booster is installed between your router and broadband modem. So you'll have two RJ-45 connections, and a power adapter to deal with in installation. Once those are all hooked up, you're done. There are no configuration screens to go through because The Broadband Booster will be completely transparent to you local area network.