Today I butchered an old laptop for it's hdd, ram and a WiFi card. I took that WiFi mini card (Broadcom BCM94311MCG) and put it into my laptop's (Dell Latitude E5430) second mini-card slot, next to my Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205. Now I have 2 WiFi cards.
Logically I came to the idea to connect my laptop to 2 networks, merge them and obtain the:
Since the only other WiFi I can connect to is a capped connection which I use strictly for my phone (UniFi), I came to yet another brilliant idea. I'll simply dust off my old router (TP Link TL-WR740N), connect it to a LAN port on my main modem provided by the ISP (Cisco EPC3925), create another WiFi network, connect to them both with my laptop, bridge them in Windows 7 via network connections, and viola, a beauty will be born.
Oh how heartbroken I was when I realized what monstrosity have I created. And that it doesn't work. It seems to only use one network at a time, and keeps the other one as a backup if the first one fails. Speeds? If I right-click the Bridge option on my main modem, I get ~ 40 Mb/s (which is exactly the same as the modem by itself), and if I right-click the Bridge option on my router then its ~10-15 Mb/s (which is even worse, since its just a cheap router).
Is there a solution to this? Is there a way to master the dark side of the networking force? Will I finally be able to obtain the unlimited power?
I have a bad news for you. From what I read I think you are trying to combine two WIfi connections into one faster. The bridge functionality you are referring to does not do what you planned to do. Bridge simply connects two networks with each other. It is not for creating faster connections:
NIC aggregation is what you ware tried to achieve, but it mainly is used to either create (fail-over in case one connection - usually cable - dies or to distribute multiple connections across multiple cables (but not single connection across multiple cables).
And I never heard about WIfi NIC aggregation (except for Wifi actually using multiple frequencies to do that within one NIC - but that is already build into WiFi NIC).
NIC aggregation is basically a general concept. Most commonly know implementation of that concept is LACP:
The closes you could get to speeding file transfers is actually between your two local machines being connected via duplicated connections and using newer version of SMB protocole (windows shares):
Well, theoretically he could speed up connections for multiple devices using a load balancer, right? Wouldn't get any faster than his fastest link though.
You might be right. There might be some limited possibility to do load balancing.
As far as I know there are two possibilities to do that on WIndows 7: 1. for two independent WIFI connections (without bridging them) to two different routers, setting the connection metric to the same value - in theory windows should do some load balancing - but it never worked for me nor I ever read that some one used it with consistent success.
or, additional software.
One thing to consider: configure separate channels on both WiFi routers.
Basically I was trying to take two connections and turn them into one, faster. I am a very basic user as far as networking goes. I know nothing. As far as everything else goes, I'm on a high skill level.
Now I've searched around, and found Speedify which seems to do what I am searching for, but I haven't yet came around to testing it. I will try, and report my results when I manage to find a moment to do it.
