LAN + WiFi for greater throughput?

[EastCoastMaster]

Is it possible to use your gigabit ethernet jack in conjunction with your wifi adapter for greater throughput than just a gigabit connection? Think of it like Teaming or Link Aggregation for multiple ethernet jacks but instead of two LAN wires you would have one LAN wire and a simultaneous WiFi connection.

 

[System Error Message]

It is possible but i wouldnt use a consumer router to do that since they just dont support the required protocol.

Teaming in the method you suggested would use the CPU unless a router has the wifi connected to the switch chip too.

 

[azazel1024]

No, it is not possible. You can't do LAG or bonding between wifi and LAN.

You could possibly access two different networks and services through a Wifi adapter and a LAN simultaneously, but that isn't really the same thing.

 

[stevech]

Is it possible to use your gigabit ethernet jack in conjunction with your wifi adapter for greater throughput than just a gigabit connection? Think of it like Teaming or Link Aggregation for multiple ethernet jacks but instead of two LAN wires you would have one LAN wire and a simultaneous WiFi connection.

No free rides. The wireless laws of physics prevail.

 

[System Error Message]

You can do combine LAN + WIFI but you would need a non windows OS and a router that supports it. In routerOS it is entirely possible to do this as long as the WIFI interface appears in the interface list. It also requires a router with CPU fast enough to handle that amount of combined bandwidth.

Consumer/SOHO routers simply dont support this because they lack the port aggregation feature on the CPU and the required protocol.

 

[System Error Message]

You can do combine LAN + WIFI but you would need a non windows OS and a router that supports it. In routerOS it is entirely possible to do this as long as the WIFI interface appears in the interface list. It also requires a router with CPU fast enough to handle that amount of combined bandwidth.

Consumer/SOHO routers simply dont support this because they lack the port aggregation feature on the CPU, the required protocol and the CPU required..

 

[azazel1024]

You can do combine LAN + WIFI but you would need a non windows OS and a router that supports it. In routerOS it is entirely possible to do this as long as the WIFI interface appears in the interface list. It also requires a router with CPU fast enough to handle that amount of combined bandwidth.

Consumer/SOHO routers simply dont support this because they lack the port aggregation feature on the CPU, the required protocol and the CPU required..

The issue you run in to that is how to put the packets bank together. It is a non-trivial issue for equivelent speed and switched connections. It gets much worse when you are talking about differently routed connections and different medium pretty much falls under differently routed in terms of the complexity.

Teaming is straight forward (but again, not a Windows/Mac thing you can do under the current OS), BONDING is very difficult.

 

[System Error Message]

in routerOS there are many different bonding methods and protocols you can use but only via the CPU. Many of them simply arent available in consumer routers. For example one simple bonding involves using Link A first until it fills up and than only use Link B once Link A is full.

This also requires a CPU that can perform bridging for at least 3 Gb/s + everything else that the router will work on aside from just that. Try the live demo for mikrotik, Although you cant make changes you can see what it can do. They have a wiki page that explains all the bonding they use.

 

[azazel1024]

Bonding and teaming are NOT the same thing. Bonding allows a single TCP/IP session over multiple links. Teaming simply allows multiple TCP/IP sessions over multiple links to the same destination.

Bonding allows things like putting a pair of 1Gbps ethernet links together to get 2Gbps for a single TCP/IP session, teaming for those two would just allow multiple TCP/IP sessions to hit that 2Gbps combined.

Are you sure you are talking about true bonding? Because it sounds more like teaming and load balancing.

 

[System Error Message]

bonding. There are multiple algorithms that you can use to load balance for bonding and it is also the term used in routerOS.

 

[azazel1024]

It still doesn't sound like it is actual bonding, though maybe I am wrong.

*edit* I just read through a couple of RouterOS docs, this is not true bonding, where multiple connections are treated as one, this is simple load balancing. You cannot push a single connection over multiple WAN or LANs (which is what bonding actually is, otherwise it is LACP/load balancing/fail over). They just happen to call it by the wrong/an inaccurate name.

The configurability in routerOS appears higher than most dual (or more) WAN routers, but the principal behind which it is working is absolutely no different. IE not true bonding, it is just load balancing or allowing failover of 2 or more WAN connections.