2 wireless Nic's in 1 pc with 2 access points (for redundancy) . Is this possible? (1 Viewer)

[Mark Giles]

Ok, I have a linksys wireless network setup in my house that has been giving me a ton of problems. My ISP is to blame, but that another story. I have discovered a little work-around that will do just fine for now. My buddy next door has a wireless network also, and he always forgets to secure it, so when I need to go online, I can just connect to his router with a slight speed loss, but no big deal. My question is this…I'm wondering if there is a way I can install a second wireless Nic card in my computer and have both of them available at all times without having to connect to each one back and forth etc.

Right now, in my computer I have the wireless card (of course) and two regular NIC cards (one built in to the motherboard). I use these one regular NIC card for hard-wiring a second PC or laptop for transferring files and the other to connect my xbox, so I figure there’s a way to simultaneously have both wireless NIC's running too. But how will I tell the computer which connection I want connected to the net if they are both active? Any suggestions? Is this doable?

 

[SethH]

I've never done it, and it may be a pain, but it should work. I would suggest, to make things easier, that you use wireless routers instead of access points. Make one of the 192.168.1.1 and the other 192.168.2.1. Next setup each of your NICs with a static IP address so that it will only listen to the router it's supposed to listen to.

 

[Mark Giles]

Ok Seth, gotcha..I'll give that a try. And forgive me. They are wireless routers. My mistake.

On the same note, I wonder if it's possible to have a total download speed of the combined speeds of both modems. Example: my down is 1mb and his is .5mb. If I can set it up to have a 1.5mb download bandwidth at all times (given we're both up and running like normal).

 

[Scott Merryfield]

IP routing doesn't work that way. The traffic will take one path or the other.

 

[Mark Giles]

I was afraid that there wasnt a way to do it. But let me ask this. When I'm downloading off the net from my wireless card (one ip address) and transferring files to and from one pc to another thru another nic card (another ip address) wouldnt this be the same concept? There's traffic going thru both right?

 

[Scott Merryfield]

Each session will attempt to find it's optimal path to the remote host. So, it is possible that your connection to the Internet would use a different path than the one to the second PC.

There are ways to bond multiple links to get combined bandwidth, but you need to control the network path to do this (and you do not control the network routers on the Internet). This technique is something that would typically be done on a private network.