Had to happen at some point ---connect to up to six unsecured Wi-Fi networks at once?

Question

This is all I know: other Wi-Fi-related product people are talking about this week? It?s called Slurpr. It?s a $1,347 (999 euros) box hand-built by Dutch hackers at Geek Technique. Why would you pay that much? Using six internal MiniPCI cards with Atheros Wi-Fi chips, it can connect to up to six unsecured Wi-Fi networks at once, and bonds the connections to provide one hefty data rate of 324 Megabits per second (in theory). Inside is 4GB of compact flash memory to hold the Debian operating system running it. Apparently, the plan for the future could include software needed to crack WEP encryption up to 128-bit.

Jeff Liebermann · Accepted Answer

Clever idea, but it won't quite do what they think.

It will not give one the ability to download at 324 MBits/sec from one web site. The speed limitation will first be by the wireless connections. If 802.11g, and very close, the best that can be done is

25Mbits/sec per connection or 150Mbit/sec total. I don't know of too many public access points running faster protocols.

Outgoing bandwidth will also not distribute equally among all the

6 connections, but will try to cram everything through one ISP.

There's the not so minor problem of self-interference. The 6 cards are unsynchronized and there will be collisions. There are also only 3 non-overlapping channels, so every usable channel (1, 6, and

11) will have at least 2 radios on the same channel.

The connection to each ISP will all have different IP addresses. Without a method of bonding all 6 streams together into one stream, the maximum download speed for any single download will be the speed of the fastest ISP connection, but no more.
You can do the same thing with a load balancing ethernet router, and 6ea wireless ethernet bridges. With separate radios, you can optimize their location for best reception of a specific wireless ISP. Bridge radios are about /ea plus 0(?) for the fancy router:

Had to happen at some point ---connect to up to six unsecured Wi-Fi networks at once?

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