using 2 wireless cards?

[DISK]

I have been scouring the web for info but have not been successfull.

I am wondering if I can use my laptop's wireless card and also a external usb wireless adapter simultaneously. Have each one connect to a seperate access point and then bridge the connections together. Does anyone know if this is possible and if so, where I may find further information regarding this subject?

 

[Law]

What exactly do you need two different wireless connection for, are you using the second connection for a backup or are you trying to load balance both connection as one?

I know that it's possible to make the other connection as a backup just incase the primary connection goes down, but I'm not quite sure how to load balance both connection as one on two different network.

 

[DISK]

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out if it is possible to use two wireless connections and balance the load between them. For instance, at the coffee shop that I frequent, they have two DSL lines and it just got me to wondering if it was possible to utilize both at the same time in an efficient manner.

 

[Law]

What the coffee shop is doing is probably with a more enhanced router and the ability to control NAT address translation or a circuit-level gateway to configure which client IP address uses which DSL line. Or they can have the second line as a backup.

You can do it with hardware or software, most likely your routers don't have the ability to do it so you'll need the software ability. I don't think windows bridge mode will load balance for you, I do know that Windows 2000/2003 server has the software to load balance between two internet connection.

Most hardware are routers with two or more WAN connection.

Let me see if I can find a software solution.

 

[Law]

The two software solution I ran into is Vicomsoft InterGate Policy Manager and Midpoint. However Midpoint website is down.

http://www.vicomsoft.com/knowledge/reference/bondteam.html

It's only a demo version. I can't seem to find any free or cheaper solution.

Here's an interesting read http://www.dslreports.com/faq/networking/2.6 Sharing - Mult. Connections or ISPs

 

[Law]

Well the only free solution I can think of is Linux OS!

 

[DISK]

Thanks for the info Law!

I will study up on the leads you gave me and hopefully I can try this out this weekend. I have an media center that I was thinking of switching over to either Fedora or FreeBSD. Also, I just thought of another source that I did not check, Sourceforge. There may be some relatively unknown opensource software solution for this yet!