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Same as Can I use two different internet connections for more speed? except for Windows 10.

Is there anything preventing us from creating a means to use two different internet connections, like two different ethernet cards or an ethernet card and a wireless card, and using the two IP addresses at once for more bandwidth (increased speed...less ping)?

My specific setup is:

  • Router > ethernet cable > computer #1
  • Router > WiFi connection > computer #1

I've already tried bridging the connections in settings with https://windowsreport.com/combine-internet-connections/ but the download speed goes way down to being almost unusable.

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  • I don't think you understand how networking works. What you have described is two different network connections, not two different Internet connections. If you were pooling dial-up connections, now, that would be a different story.
    – InterLinked
    Apr 15, 2020 at 12:47

2 Answers 2

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There is multiple reasons why your approach is flawed.

First - your bandwidth is limited by the connection of your internet uplink. Doubling the bandwidth of your computer improves the connection to your router - but that's about it. Your router can still only use the bandwidth of your uplink. And that is usually less than even the bandwidth of a single network card. Of course you can use two network cards connected to different routers on different uplinks (say, one fiber conneciton and one 4G wireless connection). But then, the other problem is still there.

Second - IP connections are stateful. A communicaiton is between two IP addresses. One source, and one destination. YOu cannot establish a connection with one IP address, and expect to receive data on another. Sure, you can forge IP packages and pretend they're coming from the other card, or half of them were coming from the other card, but even if you do that you can't expect any entity on the other end of the connection to know that it should treat all those packages as coming from the same source.

What you CAN do is tell your OS to route some routes over one network card, and others over the other. If both are connected to different uplinks, you can theorectically use the bandwidth of both uplinks at the same time - but only on parallel connections to different sources.

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  • I fully agree with the answer above - in my time I have played around with a different network configurations (including also using a dual NICs for increased speed, as the author of the topic suggests), and I fully agree that this approach is very buggy, unstable and can cause a lot of headache.
    – Artanis
    Apr 9, 2020 at 14:08
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Sorry to disappoint you, but "more speed" and especially "less lag" (as I understand from your question, you are referring to internet access) will not be improved by using dual NICs, especially if one of them is wireless. And I will not even start on the fact that such configuration is complicated, unreliable, and causes many bugs in myriad of software. Also, obviously, it will not increase your internet access speed, which is limited by your ISP, and even if you are using a direct FTTH fibre optic connection, your internet bandwidth is well within the gigabit bandwidth of your regular LAN ethernet capabilities.

If you want to have a maximum possible transfer speed between the computers in a single LAN, though, preferred way is to use POF (plastic optical fiber) instead of Ethernet/WiFi. You can purchase a used SFP network adapters, fibre cables and switches dirty cheap on ebay these days (e.g. two SFP NICs and 20m/60ft cable can be bought on ebay for under 80$) - with this setup you can get transfer speeds of up to 20Gbps (up to 2GB/sec - faster than consumer nVME SSD drives can handle).

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