Living with 3 other roommates and sharing a broadband connection has its fair share of problems.  In order to keep everyone happy I'm always looking for ways to best shape traffic on our local network.  We all make heavy use of streaming video and music, VoIP services, web surfing, and gaming.  We have a mid-tier broadband plan so plenty of bandwidth is available but making it all run smoothly and keeping the pings low is still quite the challenge.  When I heard about Hawking Technology's HBB1 Broadband Booster and the good reviews it had gotten I decided to pick one up.

It's a tiny little box with a 100 Mbit RJ-45 connection on each end and a power connector on the side.  You place it between your cable modem and your router, plug it in, and your good to go.  It's powered buy a chip made by Ubicom called the Stream Engine.  They claim a boost up to 400% and that it "eliminates lag in online gaming".  A little blue LED lights up when it is supposedly shaping traffic.  It does have a web GUI you can access but offers almost no configuration whatsoever.  Normally this would raise red flags but due to the reviews I figured I would take the chance.

I used it on our network for two weeks, using the internet as we normally would. Based on my observations and feedback from my other roommates, I would have to give this little box a thumbs down.  It did do a great job of keeping VoIP skip free and throttling back torrents but failed in just about every other category.  Streaming video and music was still plagued with buffer underruns and my ping in various games, like TF2 or WoW, would easily climb to 800+ levels.

I suppose if you wanted to use it around the office it could be of more use but as a gamer I found it pretty much useless.  I think Hawking Technology had a little too much confidence in the Stream Engine chip and having more tuneables available could have made a world of difference.