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Linking NICs on Laptop

n00b question -> Not to get too specific at this point, but I'm wondering if this is possible: I've now got 2 nics on my laptop, the first being built in, the second by card bus.

Now, these can connect to the router independently. Is it therefore possible to essentially link up the wifi connection (i.e. 2x 54mps) going to say Firefox?

Or am I just talking bollox? ;)

Reply to
Bondi (Class-1)
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Hi, You can use either but not both at the same time to double the speed.

Reply to
Tony Hwang

"Bondi (Class-1)" hath wroth:

Fine. You'll just get non-specific answers.

Sorta, maybe, kinda, but probably not.

  1. There is no way this arrangement is going to go faster for downloading from the internet through the router. The limiting speed is the internet broadband connection, not the ethernet or wireless.

  1. For local LAN traffic, you can get twice the speed, but only via completely independent connections and downloads. For example, if ethernet card #1 is connected to one machine, while ethernet card #2 is connected to another machine, you will see the speed to the laptop as the sum of the two speeds (assuming your laptop can handle it). However, if you have both connect to a single server, the limiting factor will be the single ethernet connection to that server.

  2. Your laptop has no way to do load balancing between two ethernet connections. It's not smart enough to split the load, or even to achieve seperate connections. It's done with the router table: start -> cmd -> run route print which defines where the packets go. If you have two ethernet interfaces, it will automatically assign a different "metric" or "cost" for each path, and route *ALL* packets through the cheapest.

  1. There is a technology called "multilink" that bonds two IP connections together. It's normally used for dialup, ISDN, and DSL. |
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    might be some way to do it with ethernet, but I'm too lazy to google for it (I'm late).

While not exactly what I guess you're looking for, you might wanna look at these load balancing routers to see what's available:

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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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