Network Booster

Network speeds can be fickle, and they depend on a lot of variables. The sites you interact with, your data plan and router, whether you're on Wi-Fi or wired, or if there's a heavy load on the infrastructure, among many other things.

Your settings are also of relevance, and while you have the possibility to change them, there is simply a lot that can go wrong. Network Booster aims to do that for you by scanning the sites you normally visit, suggesting a DNS address to optimize the speeds at which you access them.

Upon opening up this app, you will notice that the Full Scan option is unavailable in the Free version, so you'll only be able to use the less thorough one. Upon choosing to quick scan, the software will look up the sites you visit and suggest a more fitting DNS address if there is one, giving you instructions on how to navigate the process.

You'll have to go to your network settings and change the DNS value under your IPv4 protocol settings, and that's all. Onto the testing itself, our network speeds following its optimizations did not change at all.

Before switching to the suggested optimizations, we conducted a test we could use as a barometer for our network speeds. Upon applying the new settings, we did not notice any difference at all. We tested it on two machines with different browsing habits, and the same DNS suggestion was suggested in both cases — changing to Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 address.

Our ping took a hit on the first test, where it was thrice as big as it was before. It stabilized right after, though, and successive tests yielded results in the same ballpark as the automatic DNS ones. The same was true for the speeds themselves, very much corresponding in the before and after. A lot of these results can thus be attributed to the margin of error, which invalidates the purported "boost" the app promises.

In conclusion, we did not see any of the improvements that Network Booster had promised. While conducting tests, the results were similar, and the same can be said for the browsing experience. Even more, given how the Full Scan option is locked behind a paywall, the effects of the Quick Scan feature did not give us much confidence in the paid option.