2 Wirless adapters, connect them both to different networks, bandwith increase?

If you got two wireless adapters, and use one to connect to one network, and use the other one to connect to a different network, is there anyway of bonding the two, you get more bandwith? say i connect one to a 20mbit connection, and the other to another 20mbit connection, is there anyway to make them into 40mbit?

Is it possible in something like Vmware? downloading via virtual os in vmware using one adapter, and downloading on the original os using the other one could probably work?

but i wanna know if u can do it without that.

Thanks!

 

current cuts of 802.11xxxxx do not support simple bonding or pairing.

MIMO extensions do some of this, but you need similar/compatible hardware at both ends of the link.

Generally speaking, it's more expensive and time-consuming to force old or leftover hardware to do networking 'tricks' than it is to buy current generation hardware that can do the tricks out of the box.

 

Don't know about Windows, but on Linux, you could do multilink-PPPoE.

Of course, you'd need to be able to 'tune' 2 seperate WAP's, and you'd have to have, set up on a host (on the wired network), a machine to be the PPPoE server.

If you can overcome these obstacles, then accomplishing what you want to accomplish wouldn't be too difficult.

 

To do this in Windows, you'll need a special router. And the other end needs to be configured similarly.

It is because the Internet protocol just doesn't handle out of order protocols to two different network adapters elegantly.



It doesn't give you the theoretical speed increase you think though....

A lot like 2 cores doesn't give you DOUBLE the speed. There is some overhead in syncing the two feeds.

 

Yeah i see it's more trouble than it's worth.

Thanks guys!

 

Ummmm, yes it does actually. The CPU overhead for sync'ing the feeds is negligible, unless we're talking about dual 1-gigabit feeds here or something.

For instance, a Pentium-200 CPU can sync, on Linux, 2 40mbit/sec links (ie: T3 lines) without being saturated. Surely, a modern laptop CPU could do much better.

Its negligible.

 

I don't think network bonding is possible. For one I don't think pairing of 2 different networks are possible. Just a guess, There could be a race (1 network trying to outdo or cancel the other depending on the signal strength).

 

Its possible. ML-PPP is a well-accepted, and fairly commonly implemented solution to this problem, when there are multiple physical layer interfaces available.

All the software (hardware) needed is available, off the shelf right now. Don't know about Windows, but not hard at all in Linux.

If someone's maxxed out on a 802.11n link -- it might be worth considering.

 

You could use manually defined Gateways in network settings / application settings to force some programs use one interface and rest the other.

That way it would be possible to have 2 fast downloads (2 bittorrent clients, 2 different browsers etc) at the same time.

Not the perfect way, needs manual tinkering.

 

KLF, is there even a clean way of firing up a pair of wireless network interfaces on Vista??

 

See the main reason i would like it is for usenet, i don't use torrents, max out my 20mbit connection, then my friend next door he has 20mbit, if i could get the two to work at same time, i can get 40mbit download speeds from newgroups.

would be cool

 

So you're wanting to make the Internet (ie: the WAN) faster? Not the wireless, right?

If you and your friend use the same ISP, you could ask the ISP to set up ML-PPPoE to aggregate the two connections together. You'd have to run a suitable ML-PPPoE host (or implement the logic in one of your routers).

 

You could have 2 newsreaders downloading 2 files at the same time Effectively it would have 40mbit speed, but one single file wouldn't download faster than 20mbit now.

Pitz: this laptop has Win7 installed and using 2 networks is as simple as using one. If I find my Vista install cd somewhere, I'll try it on second hdd.

 

I use one newsreader at the mo, but i use 10 connections to the newsgroup, it maxes my 20mbit, so having 2 won't make any difference, because i can set the amount of connections to the newsgroup via the program....

p.s my neighbour hasn't got the same ISP.

 

@KLF and pitz,

Thanks for this tip, so it's really possible. Now I learned something new.