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General discussion

Can I join 2 wireless NICs to improve throughput?

by chow_yee Nov 5, 2004 10:24PM PST

Hi. I have a Dell Inspiron 5100 notebook with Dell Truemobile 1450 a/b/g MiniPCI card. I'm thinking of buying another wireless card, and "join" the 2 wireless cards together, so that when combined, they can provide a better throughput.

I remember in the past, during the days of Windows 98, there is such a feature in Windows 98. Is there such a feature in Windows XP too? And is this practice recommended?

Thank you very much.

Discussion is locked

5 Posts
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No.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Nov 5, 2004 11:02PM PST

.

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Re: Can I join 2 wireless NICs to improve throughput?
by matt02429 Nov 11, 2004 2:18AM PST

buying 2 wireless cards wouldn't do anything for you because wifi splits your bandwith equally to all devices on your network. So if you have a 54mbps router and you have 1 device connected to it, that device gets 54 mbps. If you connect another card each car will be getting 27 mbps. if you wanted to get crazy you could consider setting up 2 wifi networks and run 1 at on channel 1 and the other on channel 11 but i dont know if theres any software that would let you take advantage of that. so basically ... no

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It's actually less than 1/2 each.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Nov 11, 2004 2:19AM PST

There is some overhead to each added machine so 2 machines get about 98% of the total...

Bob

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Re: It's actually less than 1/2 each.
by chow_yee Nov 15, 2004 9:00PM PST

Hi. Thanks for your replies.

What about if the router is not fully utilised by me? For example, the router is connected to 20 people, so I'd get 1/20 of the bandwith.

If I were to add another card, then I would get 2/21 of the bandwith. Isn't it so? It's still quite a big increase.

But even if this is so, there is also one problem: it seems that only one of the wireless device is working. The other is connected, but there doesn't seem to be any data sent or received. All data seems to go through one of them. Just for the sake of curiosity, is it that Windows XP does not support dividing them up, unlike for dialup connections?

Thanks.

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Re: It's actually less than 1/2 each.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Nov 15, 2004 9:15PM PST

"What about if the router is not fully utilised by me? For example, the router is connected to 20 people, so I'd get 1/20 of the bandwith."

You get a portion of the unused bandwidth. If no one is using the internet, you get 100% of that.

It appears you are very new at this and need to get out there and watch what happens.

Bob

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