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I have a weak connection and I have an antenna Wi-Fi card. Is it possible to get an improvement in speed if I connect both cards to the AP at the same time?

Spiff
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yoyo_fun
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    Actually, it would likely slow things down since channel bonding is not supported via WiFi. – acejavelin Jul 05 '16 at 22:11
  • What is channel bonding ? – yoyo_fun Jul 05 '16 at 22:13
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    Actually, Link Aggregation would be the correct term... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation. It is using 2 connections bonded together to increase capacity. The better answer is to get a repeater, or a better network adapter and/or router. – acejavelin Jul 05 '16 at 22:15
  • I see ne reason why libk aggregation can be done in software. Half of packets are requested from one card and half from the other and then reconstructed. – yoyo_fun Jul 05 '16 at 22:23
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    There is a little more to it than that, it has to be supported on both ends of the connection for starters. This might give you some insight http://superuser.com/questions/1025471/using-two-wireless-nic-at-the-same-time-on-windows-10-desktop-pc – acejavelin Jul 05 '16 at 22:26

1 Answers1

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If you truly have a single AP, it operates on a single radio channel, so if you connect to it with two separate cards from the same machine, they will both be splitting time on the same channel, so they will not get better speeds than a single card.

If your AP is a "simultaneous dual-band" (SDB) model, then it's technically two APs in one box, and if you could connect one card to the 2.4GHz AP and one card to the 5GHz AP, you could get better performance. However, most SDB APs don't expect to see the same IP address via two different client 802.11 links, so you'll probably need to use two separate IP addresses on your client, and use your client's OS to split traffic between the two IPs. This means that the performance of a typical single TCP connection HTTP or FTP download would not be improved by the dual-card setup.

Overall, it's probably more hassle than it's worth.

Spiff
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