WiFi and Powerline Ethernet connections to one router in the same computer at the same time?

[normandy2011]

It's too complicated to explain how things got to be the way they are, so just imagine one router upstairs and one computer way down in the basement using WiFi to connect to said router.

Is it possible and, if so, would it make any difference to the connection speed experienced by the basement computer, if I do this: Establish a Powerline network by pairing a couple of Powerline adapters, connecting one adapter by Ethernet to the router and connecting the other adapter, also by Ethernet, to the basement computer? Or will this set the whole neighborhood on fire?

 

[hang-the-9]

Absolutely nothing will happen but why have both connected at the same time? The powerline networking will likely be a lot faster.

 

[Math Geek]

the powerline will offer the more stable, faster connection than the wifi. you can combine connections together but there is no need to do it for the same connection.

in the past i had a neighbors wifi connection combined with my home's network to give me more speed. the neighbor knew i was doing it and approved since i was providing us both with all the movies we could watch this was a long time ago but it was pretty easy to do.

again no benefit from doing this on the same network as your net speed is a lot slower than your connection can handle. combing the 2 would only raise your theoretical max speed while not changing the speed you are actually getting from your isp. pretty pointless

 

[normandy2011]

Absolutely nothing will happen but why have both connected at the same time? The powerline networking will likely be a lot faster.

I understand that the max internet speed is the one provided by the ISP (25 Mbps, in my case). The problem is that while other computers in the house reach that level, WiFi reception in the basement is so bad, it's only about 5 Mbps. That's when the Powerline idea came up.

Obviously, if the Powerline connection, in itself, provides a 25 Mbps connection to the router (and, consequently, to the internet), the problem will be solved and I could actually disable the wireless connection. But I was wondering what would happen if, because of faulty wiring or whatever, the Powerline connection provides only (for example) 10 Mbps to the router - would the basement computer see a total of 15 Mbps (5 from the WiFi + 10 from the Powerline) or would it get only the highest of the two (that is, only the 10 from the Powerline)? I understand that the "highest of the two" is what happens if you use two WiFi adapters in the same computer connected to one router.

 

[Math Geek]

that's an interesting idea and i think it would work. it should work the same as it did for me using my ethernet and my neighbors wifi. the pc does not care if both connections come form the same router.


if i remember correctly, what i did was bridge the connections. it was an option in network manager through windows. i looked it up and verified it did what i was thinking and activated it. was pretty simple.

if the powerline adapter does not give you the full signal, which it should, you could give it a shot. the only thing that can happen is it does not work. it won't break anything. worst case, you have to reinstall the driver for the nic. not exactly game breaking if you have to do it.

 

[normandy2011]

Thanks, Math Geek. As I mentioned, I first wanted to make sure I don't burn the house down

I should receive my Powerline adapters by middle of next week. Once installed and tested, I'll come back and report the outcome, all for the benefit of humanity! Ironically, for that to happen, we have to hope that Powerline does not work as advertized....

While we wait for that momentous event, two things about your post:

the pc does not care if both connections come form the same router.

Agreed; the only reason I mentioned that fact was that in other posts people were trying to solve similar problems while connecting to two different routers - they were trying to get one wifi adapter to connect to one router, the 2nd adapter to the other, etc. So I wanted to emphasize this is not the case here.

worst case, you have to reinstall the driver for the nic. not exactly game breaking if you have to do it.

Out of sheer intellectual curiosity - why would reinstalling the nic driver be necessary if the setup doesn't work?

 

[Math Geek]

the worst case i could imagine would be that while messing with the bridge settings, you somehow managed to screw up the settings bad enough that it would be easier to simply uninstall the driver and start over rather than trying to figure out what went wrong

again, not realistic but as worse a case as i could come up with.

another though i just had stems from another question i answered last night. by any chance is you wifi card internal with a little antenna sticking out or a usb stick. in either case my question is this. is your case sitting on the floor under a desk cluttered with a bunch of cables? i ask this because i have seen this a lot of times. the signal gets hurt big time this way. wifi is a radio signal and like any radio antenna it likes to be up nice and high to get the strongest signal. my dad's pc was like this and he got about 8 mbs about 30 ft from the router. he had a usb stick so i put it at the end of a 6 ft usb cable and taped it to the wall nice and high. he now gets the full 25 mbs he pays for by simply moving the antenna. i know you bought the powerline adapter already but if this describes your pc, it is worth a shot as well.

i normally only get the internal cards that have an antenna at the end of a long cable for this reason if the pc will be on the floor or a long way from the router. the others are fine if it is on top of a desk or in the same room as the router.

just a thought i had anyway. 😀

 

[bill001g]

You can not have 2 interfaces connected at the same time to the same router. Windows will prevent it but even if it didn't you need special software that does not even exist to combine the links when one is wireless.

More detail on why it does not work. This is a fundamental thing to how network communication works.

Lets take a simpler case you have 2 ethernet ports and you hook both those to the router. In default mode you have 2 interface and no operating system will let you assign each interface a ip in the same subnet. The is fundamental to how subnets work.

So you then get the bright idea to bridge them. When you bridge the interfaces you have now made those 2 interfaces into a 2 port switch. A switch is a multi port bridge it is just not called that most times.

If you hook 2 cable between 2 switches (your router lan ports are a switch) you can get 2 scenarios. The first is a broadcast loop. Any packet a switch does not the mac address for is forwarded out all ports. So your 2 switches will send packets back and forth in a loop pretty much shutting them down. The other option that until recently was only supported on manged switches is it runs a loop prevention protocol called spanning tree. What this does detect the loop condition and disable one of the links. So if you have spanning tree it will function but you will get no benifit at all from the second connection because it is blocked to avoid loops.

Now on ethernet cables there are some ways to bond ports but it requires special software on the switch. Even then there are restrictions to how effectively it actually combines them. There is no way to bond a ethernet and a wireless port or even 2 wireless ports. There is of course specialized radio equipment used to bond wireless but that is a different topic completely.

 

[Math Geek]

i might be wrong on what it was called but i am not sure why you say windows would block using both connections. if you set each one to a different ip why would windows care? it should make a connection over the nic and a second one through the wifi, then combines them to work together. why can the router handle traffic to many different ip's on separate devices at the same time but not be able to handle it if the 2 ip's are on the same device? is this limitation the router's issue or is it a windows issue? it sounds to me, from what you are saying, that it is a router issue that causes this problem. out of my zone here but if windows is managing the 2 connections, then any packets being asked for would be ip dependent and to the router it should look like 2 different devices anyway and the packets just get sent to the ip that asked for it. windows would put it back together once the packets come in.

or this is how i imagine it "should" work. 😀

as i said i did this with 2 separate networks and it was very simple and did not require any special software. why would using the same network all of a sudden make this tricky? clearly you have experience with this type of thing so could you elaborate a bit of why it works easily with 2 separate networks combined but not from a single one? oh and maybe dumb it down a bit for me since i don't know the vocabulary you are using 😀

this is something i have never tried so just looking to learn something new today.

 

[bill001g]

Of course you can do this with 2 separate networks. The problem comes when you try to assign to ip in the same subnet. All OS outright prevent this so you can't do it even if you want.

Lets assume you could assign 192.168.100.55 to interface 1 and 192.168.100.56 to interface 2. And assume a standard /24 subnet and a router gateway of 192.168.100.1.

So now I have traffic that needs to go the gateway to get to the ineternet. Which interface do I choose to send it to the router on. How do I make that choice and when I do. Even after I select a interface what is my mac address and ip to use. If I use the one from the interface you will could get some packets with one ip and others with a different ip. A TCP session will immediately reset if that happens.

The whole purpose of a subnet mask it to allow the machine to select the interface to send data on and know what ip and mac address to use.

Even if you have 2 completely different subnets you really can't combine them. The key problem is the ip addresses are different. If you send data to say a server from 2 different IP it will assume this is 2 different users. Even 2 different ports from the same IP is considered 2 different sessions/users. Even attempting this will cause immediate closing of the communication because it is detected as a attempt to hijack a session. Nobody would ever be foolish enough to make it work even if wasn't disallowed by the tcp standard.

The next step above this are all the silly VPN things. Which in effect hide the different IP and layer another IP on top. This also has huge issues because you now get packets out of order which is detected as packet loss and causes retransmissions.

Now sure if you want to buy expensive wan accelerator appliance (ie $100k on each end) you can like get crazy stuff to work but in a home network it is not possible to hook 2 connection to the same router from a single PC and get it to use both.

 

[Math Geek]

that was well put

i did not think of mac address being the same. that would surely cause some confusion. that makes sense as a reason to not allow it. also explains why it was easy to do with 2 different networks. windows managed the packet requests between both networks and combined them at the end.

now that i think about it like this, would the requested site not balk at this as well? since the same external ip address would be trying to make multiple connections to the site, would this possibly trigger something on that end as well. maybe think it was a ddos attack or something odd with lots of connection requests from one ip. just a thought i had as i try to merge this info with what i already know.

thanks for the explanation

edit: sorry for highjacking your thread normandy but this seems like info were are both looking to learn

 

[normandy2011]

that was well put

edit: sorry for highjacking your thread normandy but this seems like info were are both looking to learn

No, no, on the contrary - this is all an eye opener for me. As they say - learn something new every day....

And a question to you bill001g (being asked with all humility - you know way more than me about these things): Can you explain how is it still possible to - and what happens when you - use a computer with both an ethernet and a wifi connection, or with two wifi adapters?

 

[bill001g]

What windows does by default is pick a adapter that it feels is best and only 1 adapter can be "best"...ethernet normally wins. I still have not figured out for sure is when there are 2 WiFi cards but in any case it decides on a best one and uses that. You can adjust the "metric" it uses but without even more configuration it will only have a single network card active. So you can really only have one. Now it is smart enough if you were to turn off or unplug the active one to go find the next best interface and use that......it is a little flaky though.

When you want to actually use multiple adapter then you then quickly run into having to really understand how network interfaces really work. You have to completely understand what layer 2 and layer 3 really mean and how each handles the problem of selection of a path to communicate on. It is actually extremely complex because there are so many variations.

This is not a new problem it has been around since pretty much the creation of the protocols. There are many solution to the problem but because end home users do not need these feature consumer routers do not have the ability to implement any of these solutions. This is true for even windows. The server variations of the OS have much more advanced networking support than home versions.

It tends to be easiest to just say it can't be done on forums like this. Sure if you buy commercial equipment you have many more options but at the same time people who buy commercial equipment also generally have the basic network knowledge to understand these type of issues. Even with commercial equipment there are huge restrictions that you have to know and understand.

Still bottom line you will never be able to connect the same machine to a consumer router with 2 interfaces. It is the router that is too stupid the PC has some basic abilities but the router is designed for people who want to take it out of the box and turn it on and it magically work so it does have any advanced features.

 

[Math Geek]

i remember using my pc as a gateway for an xbox 360. had wifi card in the pc for net access and then the xbox connected to the ethernet card. internet connection sharing was turned on and got it going but to get all the ports forwarded to the xbox was a nightmare. the ethernet port had to have it's own domain so the xbox could talk to it and the ports had to be forwarded through the router, windows firewall (has to be turned on for internet sharing) and then the ethernet port. i get a headache thinking about it now.

took me a few days to get it all worked out. learned a lot doing it as this was my first attempt at anything this complex (i was too cheap to pay $80 for the wifi adapter from MS) and still have the notes i took and final set-up sheet i wrote to keep it all straight. i ended up doing this a bunch of times for others who were too cheap to get the wifi adapter like me 😀