How to use two seperate wifi connections at the same time.

[samuelmason]

Is it possible to get two wifi adapters and connect to two different wifi signals and take advantage of both at the same time? I'd like to do some streaming which I have enough to do on a single connection. But if I want to play a multiplayer game it cannot handle both at the same time. So perhaps I could use one connection to stream and another to game on the same computer?

I still haven't purchased my second adapter so I'd like to confirm if this is even possible before doing so. Also does it matter if I have the exact same 2 adapters? would there be driver issues? I'm not really sure how that would work.


Thank you!

 

[Tom Tancredi]

NO. And No. And No.. on everything here.

If your connection can't handle BOTH multiplayer and streaming then you need a better Internet connection. It isn't the WIFI that is the problem, it is the CONNECTION to the router; think this way, you can do 100MPH out of your driveway, but if the Road to your driveway is only 5MPH it doesn't matter how many 'driveways' (wifi adapters) you put on your house (computer) your still only 5MPH to get to the store (streaming music / multiplayer game).

 

[samuelmason]

NO. And No. And No.. on everything here.

If your connection can't handle BOTH multiplayer and streaming then you need a better Internet connection. It isn't the WIFI that is the problem, it is the CONNECTION to the router; think this way, you can do 100MPH out of your driveway, but if the Road to your driveway is only 5MPH it doesn't matter how many 'driveways' (wifi adapters) you put on your house (computer) your still only 5MPH to get to the store (streaming music / multiplayer game).

You misunderstand me, I'm not connecting to the same router/internet line. Both are entirely different lines from 2 seperate internet providers.

 

[sla70r]

I have never heard of any software that would allow this to happen.

 

[bill001g]

If you have 2 different ISP it can be done but it gets very messy. First be sure they do not use the same subnet for the lan.

The key problem you have is you are only allowed to have a single default route. If you allow multiple interfaces to get a default router the pc will still select one based on metric.

So step 1 is to only allow the default route on the connection you wish to use for your main internet connection. You can ether put a static IP on the secondary wireless nic or your can use the ROUTE DELETE command to remove the 0.0.0.0 route that points to the second wireless gateway.

Now the hard part. What you will need to do is get a list of IP addresses that you want to use the second connection. You then put in ROUTE ADD commands for those ip blocks and set the gateway ip of the secondary internet connection. This tends to be very tedious. Since the connection will get different IP addresses depending on which ISP connection they take you really need to make sure you get all the server ip. For example if you were to login into a game company login server from one IP and then attempt access the game server via the other IP the gaming company would detect that as issue and likely disconnect you. Making this even worse many sites use akamai to balance servers so the same DNS name can map to multiple IP and they can change from time to time. Keeping up with a akamai based site is lots of work.

They do make dual wan router and there is some load balancing pc software but they all have the same issue. You have to tell it somehow the relationship between server IP addresses that require them to be sourced from the same IP. This is not something a program can know and there are not lists of these relationships.

If you can come up with a very narrow list of function and servers you want to use the second connection you will have best chance of success.

 

[Tom Tancredi]

NO. And No. And No.. on everything here.

If your connection can't handle BOTH multiplayer and streaming then you need a better Internet connection. It isn't the WIFI that is the problem, it is the CONNECTION to the router; think this way, you can do 100MPH out of your driveway, but if the Road to your driveway is only 5MPH it doesn't matter how many 'driveways' (wifi adapters) you put on your house (computer) your still only 5MPH to get to the store (streaming music / multiplayer game).

You misunderstand me, I'm not connecting to the same router/internet line. Both are entirely different lines from 2 seperate internet providers.

To me this sounds SUSPICIOUSLY like your sucking off two 'neighbors' Wifis, because no business / personal home would have "two different wifi signals " to "2 seperate internet providers." That is overly costly and makes no sense. So I am calling a flag on that.

To simplify what Bill001g is saying below:
NO. Think of Wifi or Wired connection like a cell phone in your hand. While you can hold one cell phone to one ear and talk to Person A, you can physically hold # 2 cellphone to the second ear to talk to Person B the problem is when all three of you all talk. When both A and B both talk at the same time you can't tell who is saying what, and conversely when you 'speak' both A and B think your talking to them separately. So communications break down very quickly and you can't hold the 'conversation'. SAME THING for Windows, it can't talk to just ONE Wifi, and it can't understand when both Wifi talk to it at the same time. Much less WHO is actually talking as both say the same 'name' (I am Wifi, speak to me).

As for the Router-multiple connection, basically at that point your trying to "load Balance" (as he said) and getting very technical / high risk of failures with trying to 'force' a third seperate device to do the work your asking (and are very COSTLY) then cable connect that to your PC (no you couldn't redistribute the two wifi signals as wifi signals, that means you have to have ACCESS to both router's Admin functions and setup things as AP/Repeater Bridges).

 

[samuelmason]

NO. And No. And No.. on everything here.

If your connection can't handle BOTH multiplayer and streaming then you need a better Internet connection. It isn't the WIFI that is the problem, it is the CONNECTION to the router; think this way, you can do 100MPH out of your driveway, but if the Road to your driveway is only 5MPH it doesn't matter how many 'driveways' (wifi adapters) you put on your house (computer) your still only 5MPH to get to the store (streaming music / multiplayer game).

You misunderstand me, I'm not connecting to the same router/internet line. Both are entirely different lines from 2 seperate internet providers.

To me this sounds SUSPICIOUSLY like your sucking off two 'neighbors' Wifis, because no business / personal home would have "two different wifi signals " to "2 seperate internet providers." That is overly costly and makes no sense. So I am calling a flag on that.

To simplify what Bill001g is saying below:
NO. Think of Wifi or Wired connection like a cell phone in your hand. While you can hold one cell phone to one ear and talk to Person A, you can physically hold # 2 cellphone to the second ear to talk to Person B the problem is when all three of you all talk. When both A and B both talk at the same time you can't tell who is saying what, and conversely when you 'speak' both A and B think your talking to them separately. So communications break down very quickly and you can't hold the 'conversation'. SAME THING for Windows, it can't talk to just ONE Wifi, and it can't understand when both Wifi talk to it at the same time. Much less WHO is actually talking as both say the same 'name' (I am Wifi, speak to me).

As for the Router-multiple connection, basically at that point your trying to "load Balance" (as he said) and getting very technical / high risk of failures with trying to 'force' a third seperate device to do the work your asking (and are very COSTLY) then cable connect that to your PC (no you couldn't redistribute the two wifi signals as wifi signals, that means you have to have ACCESS to both router's Admin functions and setup things as AP/Repeater Bridges).

First of all, I'm not "leeching" off anyone. I have a very unique situation which is why I came here to ask this question. Second of all I did mention in my post that I wanted to use each connection for a seperate task. As in I don't want to use both connections to load the same youtube video. Thirdly, your simplification of bill001g seems off and I want to thank him for not making assumptions and letting me know of the possibilities and limitations of such task.

Perhaps my initial post was poorly written which led you to these assumptions. Either way thanks but no thanks!

 

[samuelmason]

NO. And No. And No.. on everything here.

If your connection can't handle BOTH multiplayer and streaming then you need a better Internet connection. It isn't the WIFI that is the problem, it is the CONNECTION to the router; think this way, you can do 100MPH out of your driveway, but if the Road to your driveway is only 5MPH it doesn't matter how many 'driveways' (wifi adapters) you put on your house (computer) your still only 5MPH to get to the store (streaming music / multiplayer game).

http://speedify.com/press/

"Toms Hardware - Even a single stream such as a Netflix movie can be split between two or three Internet connections for a higher resolution and faster buffering"

Have a nice day!

 

[bill001g]

This is a massively complex topic that will take quite a bit to give you even a hint of the problems. Speedify can only partially solve this issue the only way to truly do this is to put hardware appliance on both ends. They can easily solve the issue of traffic you send since they have a server but traffic you receive is much harder since you machine and your routers are involved.

So the first major issue is you must send all the traffic to a remote location via a vpn. This eats bandwidth because of the packet overhead but it also add quite a bit a latency because you data must go though some remote data center that may no be in the optimum path to the servers.

So the VPN solves the issue of the different IP.

The problem is you now get a problem that is almost as bad. If the ISP connections are not very closely matched in latency to the VPN center the packets get out of order. Out of order packets are detected as packet loss by the end applications. They will ask to have packets retransmitted which increases the utilization with trash and if it gets bad enough it will drop the session. This is almost impossible to solve, they must buffer large amounts of data and deliver it in bursts. You trade increased latency for bandwidth.

There are huge white papers that you can find discussing the issue of load balancing by packet on links with different speeds and latencies. It quickly gets into topics like splitting larger packets so all packets take the same delivery time. If were as simple as buying speedify companies like riverbed would never be able to sell hardware appliances that do this for $50,000 per end.

You can try speedify but I would not expect much especially if you are trying to combine say a mobile broadband connection and a cable modem. The differences in the latency require huge buffers to avoid out of order data.

Their other software dispatch is basically a fancy version of the route commands. If you let it attempt to load balance by session counts or round robin you will quickly run into the issue of accessing the same server from both IP addresses. When you open a web page there are massive numbers of session being opened and many times these have dependencies on coming from the same IP address. So you can use this rather than the route commands, it is a little easier to configure but it is not some magic software. If you let it try to load balance on its own you will quickly find web sites that do not work as you would expect.

 

[NetEssence]

Is it possible to get two wifi adapters and connect to two different wifi signals and take advantage of both at the same time? I'd like to do some streaming which I have enough to do on a single connection. But if I want to play a multiplayer game it cannot handle both at the same time. So perhaps I could use one connection to stream and another to game on the same computer?

I still haven't purchased my second adapter so I'd like to confirm if this is even possible before doing so. Also does it matter if I have the exact same 2 adapters? would there be driver issues? I'm not really sure how that would work.


Thank you!

You can bond two, three or even four ADSL lines using a special router. Installation is quick and easy. We recently deployed this solution for a client who could not get high speed broadband but who needed greater capacity.

The routers that can support this are Netgear DGN 1000 (2 bonded lines) and Power Router Pro 3-4 bonded lines).

Once you have greater capacity, you can stream over a faster WiFi router; perhaps consider using an 802.11ac router.

The fact that we can do this in the UK implies that it can be done in the US.

 

[NetEssence]

Is it possible to get two wifi adapters and connect to two different wifi signals and take advantage of both at the same time? I'd like to do some streaming which I have enough to do on a single connection. But if I want to play a multiplayer game it cannot handle both at the same time. So perhaps I could use one connection to stream and another to game on the same computer?

I still haven't purchased my second adapter so I'd like to confirm if this is even possible before doing so. Also does it matter if I have the exact same 2 adapters? would there be driver issues? I'm not really sure how that would work.


Thank you!

You can bond two, three or even four ADSL lines using a special router. Installation is quick and easy. We recently deployed this solution for a client who could not get high speed broadband but who needed greater capacity.

The routers that can support this are Netgear DGN 1000 (2 bonded lines) and Power Router Pro 3-4 bonded lines).

Once you have greater capacity, you can stream over a faster WiFi router; perhaps consider using an 802.11ac router.

http://www.net-essence.com/broadband-and-voip/broadband/

The fact that we can do this in the UK implies that it can be done in the US.

Don't you know it actually makes you look foolish when you come to a site and and try to advertise your product when a end user can't even think to buy this. Maybe you should tell him to buy a VDSL router or maybe a super high speed fiber router.

You can put all the fancy bonding equipment you want on your side of the connection if the ISP does not offer that as a service then it will do nothing. And of course if they do offer the service it will not be for free.

A ISP can put in anything you are willing to pay for but it is not some go the store and buy something and all your problems are solved.

Hi,

I am not trying to sell anything as I believe the OP is in the US and we are in the UK.

The ISP does not need to support line bonding - the bonding is done by the routers that I mentioned above. I mentioned the models so that anybody seeing this post can go out and buy the routers or do further research for themselves.

The link is only intended to provide some additional information.

 

[bill001g]

Is it possible to get two wifi adapters and connect to two different wifi signals and take advantage of both at the same time? I'd like to do some streaming which I have enough to do on a single connection. But if I want to play a multiplayer game it cannot handle both at the same time. So perhaps I could use one connection to stream and another to game on the same computer?

I still haven't purchased my second adapter so I'd like to confirm if this is even possible before doing so. Also does it matter if I have the exact same 2 adapters? would there be driver issues? I'm not really sure how that would work.


Thank you!

You can bond two, three or even four ADSL lines using a special router. Installation is quick and easy. We recently deployed this solution for a client who could not get high speed broadband but who needed greater capacity.

The routers that can support this are Netgear DGN 1000 (2 bonded lines) and Power Router Pro 3-4 bonded lines).

Once you have greater capacity, you can stream over a faster WiFi router; perhaps consider using an 802.11ac router.

http://www.net-essence.com/broadband-and-voip/broadband/

The fact that we can do this in the UK implies that it can be done in the US.

Don't you know it actually makes you look foolish when you come to a site and and try to advertise your product when a end user can't even think to buy this. Maybe you should tell him to buy a VDSL router or maybe a super high speed fiber router.

You can put all the fancy bonding equipment you want on your side of the connection if the ISP does not offer that as a service then it will do nothing. And of course if they do offer the service it will not be for free.

A ISP can put in anything you are willing to pay for but it is not some go the store and buy something and all your problems are solved.

Hi,

I am not trying to sell anything as I believe the OP is in the US and we are in the UK.

The ISP does not need to support line bonding - the bonding is done by the routers that I mentioned above. I mentioned the models so that anybody seeing this post can go out and buy the routers or do further research for themselves.

The link is only intended to provide some additional information.

You are posting your company in order to advertise business why else would you do it. You could post links to routers or whatever.

I will be very blunt then. You are a fool if you think you can just buy some magic router and it bond the circuits. If you are such a expert now explain how these magic routers can solve the problem of having 2 different ip addresses and send packets for the same session over both. How do you make this work when it is a fundamental violation of how tcpip works. You have no clue do you if you think the ISP does not need to be involved.

You did not even read the post where this was discusses.

Now I can just laugh at you for posting a company link and showing then showing how skilled you really are.;

 

[NetEssence]

Is it possible to get two wifi adapters and connect to two different wifi signals and take advantage of both at the same time? I'd like to do some streaming which I have enough to do on a single connection. But if I want to play a multiplayer game it cannot handle both at the same time. So perhaps I could use one connection to stream and another to game on the same computer?

I still haven't purchased my second adapter so I'd like to confirm if this is even possible before doing so. Also does it matter if I have the exact same 2 adapters? would there be driver issues? I'm not really sure how that would work.


Thank you!

You can bond two, three or even four ADSL lines using a special router. Installation is quick and easy. We recently deployed this solution for a client who could not get high speed broadband but who needed greater capacity.

The routers that can support this are Netgear DGN 1000 (2 bonded lines) and Power Router Pro 3-4 bonded lines).

Once you have greater capacity, you can stream over a faster WiFi router; perhaps consider using an 802.11ac router.

http://www.net-essence.com/broadband-and-voip/broadband/

The fact that we can do this in the UK implies that it can be done in the US.

Don't you know it actually makes you look foolish when you come to a site and and try to advertise your product when a end user can't even think to buy this. Maybe you should tell him to buy a VDSL router or maybe a super high speed fiber router.

You can put all the fancy bonding equipment you want on your side of the connection if the ISP does not offer that as a service then it will do nothing. And of course if they do offer the service it will not be for free.

A ISP can put in anything you are willing to pay for but it is not some go the store and buy something and all your problems are solved.

Hi,

I am not trying to sell anything as I believe the OP is in the US and we are in the UK.

The ISP does not need to support line bonding - the bonding is done by the routers that I mentioned above. I mentioned the models so that anybody seeing this post can go out and buy the routers or do further research for themselves.

The link is only intended to provide some additional information.

You are posting your company in order to advertise business why else would you do it. You could post links to routers or whatever.

I will be very blunt then. You are a fool if you think you can just buy some magic router and it bond the circuits. If you are such a expert now explain how these magic routers can solve the problem of having 2 different ip addresses and send packets for the same session over both. How do you make this work when it is a fundamental violation of how tcpip works. You have no clue do you if you think the ISP does not need to be involved.

You did not even read the post where this was discusses.

Now I can just laugh at you for posting a company link and showing then showing how skilled you really are.;

If it makes you feel better, I have removed the link from my original post.

Now, go and read the FAQs here - http://www.sharedband.com/solutions/faq - and you will learn that line bonding is really quite simple.

In future, please don't insult people who know more than you and preferably, don't post any more on this site. Your comments are not helpful for people who are looking for useful advice.

 

[ib2007]

The only time i've seen 2 different outside links connected to a network were adsl and they were connected in such a way if one goes down router then reroutes through second for redundancy. I don't believe you can link various sources together into a single link. If you have it documented please share here i'd love to read all about it.

 

[bill001g]

Is it possible to get two wifi adapters and connect to two different wifi signals and take advantage of both at the same time? I'd like to do some streaming which I have enough to do on a single connection. But if I want to play a multiplayer game it cannot handle both at the same time. So perhaps I could use one connection to stream and another to game on the same computer?

I still haven't purchased my second adapter so I'd like to confirm if this is even possible before doing so. Also does it matter if I have the exact same 2 adapters? would there be driver issues? I'm not really sure how that would work.


Thank you!

You can bond two, three or even four ADSL lines using a special router. Installation is quick and easy. We recently deployed this solution for a client who could not get high speed broadband but who needed greater capacity.

The routers that can support this are Netgear DGN 1000 (2 bonded lines) and Power Router Pro 3-4 bonded lines).

Once you have greater capacity, you can stream over a faster WiFi router; perhaps consider using an 802.11ac router.

http://www.net-essence.com/broadband-and-voip/broadband/

The fact that we can do this in the UK implies that it can be done in the US.

Don't you know it actually makes you look foolish when you come to a site and and try to advertise your product when a end user can't even think to buy this. Maybe you should tell him to buy a VDSL router or maybe a super high speed fiber router.

You can put all the fancy bonding equipment you want on your side of the connection if the ISP does not offer that as a service then it will do nothing. And of course if they do offer the service it will not be for free.

A ISP can put in anything you are willing to pay for but it is not some go the store and buy something and all your problems are solved.

Hi,

I am not trying to sell anything as I believe the OP is in the US and we are in the UK.

The ISP does not need to support line bonding - the bonding is done by the routers that I mentioned above. I mentioned the models so that anybody seeing this post can go out and buy the routers or do further research for themselves.

The link is only intended to provide some additional information.

You are posting your company in order to advertise business why else would you do it. You could post links to routers or whatever.

I will be very blunt then. You are a fool if you think you can just buy some magic router and it bond the circuits. If you are such a expert now explain how these magic routers can solve the problem of having 2 different ip addresses and send packets for the same session over both. How do you make this work when it is a fundamental violation of how tcpip works. You have no clue do you if you think the ISP does not need to be involved.

You did not even read the post where this was discusses.

Now I can just laugh at you for posting a company link and showing then showing how skilled you really are.;

If it makes you feel better, I have removed the link from my original post.

Now, go and read the FAQs here - http://www.sharedband.com/solutions/faq - and you will learn that line bonding is really quite simple.

In future, please don't insult people who know more than you and preferably, don't post any more on this site. Your comments are not helpful for people who are looking for useful advice.

I am very helpful you are the newcomer to this forum that just post links he does not even understand himself. If you had been around for a while you would know my qualification...or do I have to post my CCIE numbers for you to learn.

Your post saying you can just buy some magic router to solve this and then you post a link to a service that likely is using a form of VPN bonding shows you have no clue at all. So now I have to buy a special router and then buy a service from a provider. This is not actual bonding in the way that term is normally used.

This was clearly discussed that you could use a similar product called speedify and why that has limitations many of which are actually documented in the site you link.

If you had posted discussion then maybe I would not be so aggressive in my comments toward you. Too many people do google search and post the results not knowing anything about what they actually found. The worst offenders post links to products or companies they represent.

 

[technonerd]

It can work but is, as others have stated more complicated, and likely more expensive then a 2 dollar movie from Netflix really deserves. That said, I'm doing it presently with pretty good success and measurable increase in download speeds for file transfers and actually using speedify to virtually bond the connections but that is on top of several other things I'm doing as well.

Simple solution: you could just use a 4g and 802.11 with two wireless adapters or a tether, combine in speedify, turn on Netflix, and watch your mobile phone data limit drain away while binge watching house of cards with nary a hiccup. But since you mentioned gaming, this probably won't work. You're going to run into latency bummers which ruin a good game any day of the week. Hence the solution below with latency rules in the outbound polices to make the experience a snappy 44ms.

More complex solution: Here's my setup which i describe to remove the theoretical and opinionated aspect from the conversation:

I'm using a peplink balance 30 router that is combining 2 DSL and 1 SAT connection to aggregate those into 3 WAN connections that amount to 8 x 8 x 18 which is then fed back through a 24 port switch, one of which then feeds a Ubiquity access point. I have alot of outbound policies and bandwidth shaping algorithms on top of that, but suffice to say with some experimentation you can get the results you want based on the application / use you want bandwidth for if you're willing to tinker. This is where issues of latency and bandwidth come in. But really the peplink does an excellent job once you have the right policy for the right application or machine.

From there, I configure desired machines to use both wired, and wireless and then virtually bond those connections using speedify, which in side by side testing has proven to me that i can aggregate those connections in a virtual sense through what is basically a packet reassembling VPN process that does improve the speed over any one WAN max. You can do this with the Peplink Balance 310 as well and a subscription to a 3rd party running a second Balance 310 that will then create a VPN doing what I believe is a similiar thing to what speedify is doing. And no i dont work for any one of these organizations but i do work in technology and software so tinkering is what we do.

I continue to experiment, and there's many ways i could skin this for example i could assign WAN1 to the wired connections, WAN 2 to the wireless, and then connect to both, bond with speedify, and get 8MB x 2 for 16 taking the router out of the equation. Presently, I'm mixing all connections and letting the router "figure out" how to balance that bandwidth when a wired and wireless connection request maximum available bandwidth, but again, it's working pretty well.

That said, DSL lines are 60 each and Sat is 140 and caps you at 20GB month so it's an expensive way to get a 32MB Down connection but if you run a business from your home, and need bandwidth and like to live a bit out of the city, then there you go. Otherwise just get an apartment next to FIOS and save yourself alot of time. Oh, and don't forget the annual subscription to Speedify for 60 bucks. Plus of course 3k of routing hardware.

PS i did also connect my 4g Note 4 via tether, and aggregated that with the full LAN, and then ran a speed test with 2 bars of services on the 4g and, according to speedof.me hit 22MB of download speed using speedify to aggregate. Using the peplink with DSL1 and DSL2 and then 4g all active did not return the same results according to speed of me capping out at 8MB on one machine although i could run two speed tests simultaneously and would get 8MB on each as opposed to just 4MB each. I would have thrown in the SAT connection to and probably hit 40MB but I actually reached my data cap mainly due to a bunch of broadband tests halfway through the month so i'll have to test that in the middle of night.

Next I'll be testing actual file download speeds and will follow up with time for 1GB file downloads with different scenarios. Hopefully the movie you're watching is worth it...