Over the past year we've watched in dismay as more and more devices require cloud service accounts to unlock their full potential. Cisco made its routers worse with a software update that forced users onto a cloud service with less functionality than the traditional management interface, and then Razer required Internet connections in order to use all the capabilities of a gaming mouse.

It's not that cloud services are inherently bad—many are extraordinarily useful. The issue is that physical devices that always worked just fine without an Internet connection shouldn't require users to upload data to some vendor's servers and create a new username and password unless there's a good reason for it.

Along came a new example today, but one that may well turn out to be good for users—even those who want to keep all their data completely out of anyone's cloud. Wireless chip maker Qualcomm Atheros today 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.

The optimal policies for each application are then packaged into periodic firmware updates sent back to routers. People who sign up for the cloud service and contribute data will get the updated policies in automatic updates. Even those who want nothing to do with the cloud service can get the benefits by updating their router whenever they'd like.

Hardware partners D-Link and Alienware will show off routers using the service at the Consumer Electronics Show next week, and it should be available on shipping products in the spring. Opting in to the cloud service will require users to create an online account with an e-mail address and password. Qualcomm Atheros promises it will anonymize all data collected.

Nonetheless, it seems odd that one can't contribute to the crowdsourced database without creating an account with yet another username/password pair to remember. Dropping the account requirement might also boost adoption rates, thus making the crowdsourced data more accurate (or at least more extensive). In response to my questions, StreamBoost Director of Product Management Mike Cubbage said Qualcomm Atheros is open to allowing contributions without a cloud account, but as envisioned today the service will require a username and password.

How much traffic management do we really need?

So why this all this traffic management necessary, since the world is about to move on to Gigabit per second routers with the new 802.11ac standard? While you might have a gigabit flowing through your house, you still probably have anywhere from 1 to 100 megabits per second coming from your Internet provider. If you're on the low end, some video streams or online games can eat it up fairly quickly.

Cubbage says current routers are often good at prioritizing one application to make sure it has the bandwidth it needs but fail when it comes to managing many applications at once. He gives the example of YouTube only needing 4Mbps, yet asking the router for 20Mbps and getting it. "Applications ask for what they want, not what they need," he said. With services like Netflix, requirements also change fairly frequently by a half-megabit here and there, making it important to get the latest information to routers, he said. StreamBoost would also help make sure a voice call over Skype won't be affected by BitTorrent uploads and downloads.

If you are uploading usage data, not everything gets collected, and what does stays anonymous, Cubbage said. "From time to time we will take packet captures of streams that we have completely de-identified from the user and we'll basically bring those up to our cloud, do our crowdsourcing, and figure out what is happening in the world, and how should we make changes." The StreamBoost analysis servers are hosted in a third-party cloud service, likely the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or something similar (Qualcomm declined to say exactly which one it's using).

"We are constantly monitoring and evaluating streams to see if 1: has any current stream changed, 2: are there new streams to identify, and 3: should we be changing policies. Has a certain stream changed the amount of bandwidth it needs," Cubbage said. "There's a monitoring of all that and the data collection, if you will, is done in the cloud. Once the cloud makes a decision, it goes back and updates the individual router, the table on the router to make sure that router is getting the latest and greatest information."

Updates won't be sent to the routers every day, and they will only happen when there's no network traffic to avoid disruption. The service is exclusive to Qualcomm Atheros, of course, so you can't get the benefits without using a StreamBoost-enabled router.

With the exception of the crowdsourcing, just about everything happens on the router itself rather than in the cloud. A router management interface lets users view all the devices on their network, the upload and download speeds available to each one, and the applications they're running, and make changes to prioritization. While you can access this anywhere in the world through a proxy using the StreamBoost cloud, the management tool can also be used locally without a cloud account.

Here's what the management interface will look like:

StreamBoost isn't available yet, so we can't say how well it works or if users will notice a major improvement over current routers. Certainly, many users will prefer not to upload application usage data to Qualcomm Atheros because of privacy concerns, even if it's done in anonymized form. What's good here is the choice: you can skip the cloud service without losing any major functionality, and the benefits gained from crowdsourcing data will flow even to those who don't want their router constantly uploading data to the vendor that made it.