Pair two wireless NICs in Vista for increased throughput

[WebMaximus]

Hi,

Used to have a Netgear WPN824 router and a WPN311 wireless NIC and I have now replaced them with a D-Link DIR-655 router and a DWA-140 wireless NIC.

Now to my question...is it in some way possible to have Windows (Vista) use both wireless NICs by pairing them into 1 "virtual" NIC and by doing so benefit from increased throughput since I get about 70 Mbit with my new DWA-140 and about 20 Mbit when using my old WPN311 card. If that would be possible and if the router would be able to handle it I could then get the same approx 90 Mbit I get when running a wired connection to my new D-Link router.

Thanks in advance for any tips/input!

//Richard

 

[scotty]

It's generally possible yes, you're looking for a NIC pairing utility. Many servers and enterprise products use NIC pairing to various extents. I don't know of any off hand of one that is downloadable, and using two different wireless adaptors might be problematic. Based on this I'm not sure if it would be possible, and my guess is that your gains in speed will be negligible.

 

[WebMaximus]

OK, thanks for your input!

Guess I will just have to find a free spot for my old Netgear NIC in the basement them with all other old PC junk

Also have a totally different question, when looking at all settings in my new D-Link DIR-655 router I haven't really understood what the big difference is between what is called Virtual Servers and Port Forwarding since you in both cases redirect traffic on a specified port to a specific PC on the inside of the router - do you or anyone else know when to use what and what the main differences are?

 

[Brandon]

Most servers use duel ports for zero point of failure these days. On rare occasions (File servers mostly) you will find a spanned network connection (2-4 Nic's using the same IP address). Windows however has a much lower track record when it comes to load balancing compaired to Linux based systems.

For the most part you won't see any real speeds upgrades over the single port, unless you have multiple connections. Your switch also has to support (I can't think of the protocol at the moment -_-) which is an average feture on smart-switches. Most go bonkers when you plug two devices in with the same IP.

As Scotty said, most NIC's require the same model, as well has have to support it.

 

[scotty]

I have the DIR655 as well. There is no difference between 'virtual servers' and port forwarding. They both do the same thing. The virtual servers option is just something to make life easier for people who might not know a lot about port forwarding. It's pre-configured with various common server protocols (POP3, SMTP, SSL, etc) which you can just easily forward to a machine, instead of having to know what ports are needed and having to do it manually in the 'port forwarding' section.

In other words, setting up a virtual 'SMTP' server for the local machine 192.168.0.150 is the same as forwarding port 25 to that machine. The 'Virtual Server' is just the 'figure it out for me' option.

 

[WebMaximus]

Just reset my old router to factory default settings and now it will go together with my old NIC down to the basement

Thanks alot guys for your input in this matter!

 

[WebMaximus]

Thanks for the clarification Scotty regarding virtual servers-port forwarding!

 

[corndog]

Hi,

Now to my question...is it in some way possible to have Windows (Vista) use both wireless NICs by pairing them into 1 "virtual" NIC and by doing so benefit from increased throughput since I get about 70 Mbit with my new DWA-140 and about 20 Mbit when using my old WPN311 card. If that would be possible and if the router would be able to handle it I could then get the same approx 90 Mbit I get when running a wired connection to my new D-Link router.

//Richard

It's my expectation this won't give you much of a boost. A wireless network works much like an old ethernet hub. Every connection, if it is really streaming, generally will saturate your available bandwidth. If you try to team two connections, they will only compete with each other, and slow each other down, so the total combined bandwidth is pretty much the same as what you were getting with one.

Now, if you have one wireless card on 2.4GHz and the other one on 5GHz, you might see some results. However, your router will have to be able to understand and combine the two connections at its end too. Otherwise you run the risk of creating a broadcast loop.

I did this once by putting two wireless cards (one 2.4GHz and the other 5GHz) in my laptop, and then combining the two with XP's bridging mode. The each wireless card was connected to a different Access point, but both access points were on the same switch. My network became saturated with broadcasts to the point where my XP machine locked up and I had to reboot both access points. It's like plugging multiple cables between a bunch of switches. Simple entry level switches will go crazy. You need Spanning-Tree protocol active on higher-end switches to handle a situation like this without causing problems.

 

[WebMaximus]

Yes, I already given up on this idea and actually I'm quite pleased with the speed I already got.

Thanks anyway for your input though!