Multi wireless distributed networking?

Question

If I worked near 10 open wireless networks, and would like to harness the power of all these networks: is there a way I can have 10 wireless network adapters each one connected to a different network to maximize my upload/download?

OK, so it's mostly a theoretical question.

Answer 1

This is called 'adapter teaming' but I have never seen it for wireless adapters.

Answer 2

Apparently Microsoft thinks it's a good enough idea to have done this:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/virtualwifi/default.htm

It's unsupported by MS and untested by me.

Hope this helps! ;-) -Mathew

Answer 3

I wouldn't recommend you do this but it theoretically it is possible but would have its limitations.

First each wireless AP would have to have a unique subnet. This is unlikely since most consumer AP's default to 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x. But lets assume for the sake of theory that they are all unique.

Since each adapter would be on it's own network with it's own IP address I'm not sure that adapter teaming would be applicable here even if the hardware supported it.

What you could do is manipulate your routing table so that different Internet subnets are handled by different adapters. This approach will not yield a good balanced traffic load...but it could help in some very limited cases.

I'm not even sure it would work with bit torrents because your TCP/IP session to the tracker would be out of one of the 10 networks and all the peer traffic would be established on that connection.

If you were to download files from 10 ftp sites you could put in 10 static routes and pull each download off a different adapter. But not very practical.

Answer 4

You would not be able to increase your maximum bandwidth for one transfer beyond that of the fastest link(you can't combine them for one transfer) without controlling the other end of the link.

It's possible to load balance the connections and use them all for separate connections though.