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Thread: connecting to two wireless networks at the same time?

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    Senior Member UltraMagnus's Avatar
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    connecting to two wireless networks at the same time?

    if i install a wireless card into my notebook that already has integrated wireless is it possible to connect to two seperate wireless networks at the same time? (one is mine, and i have permission to use the other) so that i can use the internet bandwith of both networks?

    thanks in advance!

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    Pretty sure there's zero chance of doing that.

    As I'm sure you're aware you should be able to setup profiles for each network so you can easily switch.

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    Yes you can have separate profiles to allow for switching easily, but you cant connect to both on a single wireless card.

    If you have two wireless cards you can connect to both at once, however, even this wont allow you to share internet access between the two. If you want to do that aswell you would need to find a load balancer (which would be very hard to install on a windows system...).

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    Ex-MSFT Paul Adams's Avatar
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    Connecting to 2 WLANs simultaneously using 2 wireless NICs is perfectly fine, however you can't get implicit load balancing because of the problem of gateways.

    Windows likes to have 1 default gateway, which is the address of the router which allows it to send network traffic to all non-local subnets that do not have an explicit route.
    Having more than 1 default gateway doesn't help, as the network card binding order still gives preference to working gateways higher up the list.


    In a WAN environment you can happily use multiple static routes to connect a multi-homed machine to achieve "load balancing" of sorts, as you know the subnets in question.
    With the Internet you don't really have that luxury, so while you could set up a huge collection of static routes pointing to your non-default gateway, the overhead of trying to maintain that list dynamically would cripple your machine.


    If you had a set of remote sites with static IPs which you used heavily for downloading using whatever protocols you like, then you could put static routes in for those destination IP addresses to use the second WLAN - that would give you utilisation of both WLANs but not "load balancing" per se.

    The hassle of trying to set this up, combined with the hassle if one of the WLANs dropped your client would far outweigh the possible benefit, however.
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