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If I have two of the same 150Mbps wireless N routers hooked into a main non-wireless router as wireless repeaters (DHCP disabled on wireless routers and they are essentially no longer routers) does their independent bandwidth stack effectively equalling 300Mbps?

I would have them spread over the house such that they would really be acting as range boosters and I imagine by default the answer is that they are not currently stacking but perhaps some configuration adjustments might allow this?

I see nothing stopping it except the capability of the wireless cards connecting to them.

I guess another or better question is do two identical non-routing wireless routers complement each other or fight each other? ie, If I were to have 4 of these same routers, would my wireless network be capable of 600 Mbps?

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If you have two access points on separate frequencies, or far enough away from each other that their radio's don't interfere with each other and they are physically connect to the same LAN, then you would get the combined throughput for both routers. But keep in mind that a system with a single wireless card could only be connected to a single AP, so a single computer gets only the bandwidth from one AP.

If you were putting APs in a school, conference center or something you will often have dozens of APs scattered around the building(s), with the power levels and frequencies adjusted so the APs do not overlap. This permits you to have far more clients then you could support on a single AP.

In the case of home use, having lots of APs probably would be of little or no value unless your house is so big that you actually need that many APs to get good coverage across the entire area. Your clients systems are not usually going to have multiple radios so they could connected to multiple APs at once. If you have a client with multiple radios, it takes some pretty serious/obscure config to get bonding setup properly so that you could actually use multiple APs in a useful way.

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  • What if, for instance, I got two 300Mbps USB wireless adapters for my computer and bridged them. Also assume the routers are within about 20-25 feet. Would this machine be able to get the full 600Mbps?
    – Enigma
    Feb 14, 2013 at 3:07
  • @Enigma, unless it has two WiFi cards, and you do some serious configuration work (bonding the interfaces), no.
    – vonbrand
    Feb 14, 2013 at 3:42
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    Bridging is not bonding. Bridging turns your computer into a switch. Bonding makes multiple physical interfaces appear to be a single interface to your OS, combined with one of several methods to distribute frames/packets between the interfaces. There is almost no way you would get 600Mps. getting the frames distributed perfectly simply won't happen. packets will arrive out of order across the multiple links, causing issues.
    – Zoredache
    Feb 14, 2013 at 4:12
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No wireless adapters do not stack. Single wireless routers and adapters can use multiple frequencies to boost bandwidth (see MIMO). This is what a lot of the newer N routers use.

It might be possible to use multiple wireless adapters in a single PC connected to multiple routers to boost overall system bandwidth but individual application bandwidth would not be greater. That is because each adapter would get its own IP address and most applications channel all of their traffic thru one connection.

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  • At least in Linux you can bond interfaces (i.e., have 2 or more interfaces that are handled as if it was one). Takes lots of heavy tweaking in the machine and the networks to which they connect.
    – vonbrand
    Feb 14, 2013 at 3:43
  • Isn't the bonding your referring to taken care of by bridging the devices?
    – Enigma
    Feb 14, 2013 at 3:48
  • Wireless bridges are a way to connect two or more network segments not to bond them. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_bridge. Feb 14, 2013 at 4:09
  • No I mean if go into the network adapters control panel page and select 2 adapters and bridge them together. It either effectively links them as one or passes data through one to another or something.
    – Enigma
    Feb 14, 2013 at 4:12

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