A wireless router that tracks user activity—but for a good reason

Wireless chip maker Qualcomm Atheros unveiled StreamBoost, which intelligently manages your home's broadband connection on routers based on Qualcomm's 802.11ac technology. StreamBoost stops devices and applications from hogging more bandwidth than they need, preventing slowdown for other devices and apps.

Most of what this technology does happens locally on the router, with a detection engine that analyzes what application is running and a policy engine that allocates however many kilobits or megabits per second the application needs. For example, the detection engine will sense that Netflix is playing a video at 1080p or some other resolution and apply the correct policy. While detecting applications and applying policies happens on your router, there's an optional cloud component that uploads data about application usage to Qualcomm Atheros. The chipmaker wants to crowdsource information about the bandwidth usage of applications such as video streams and use that data to more accurately determine how much bandwidth each application needs.