Combine WiFi and Ethernet connection

[TheSpectre]

Hi guys. I searched high and low on the forums (well, really i just searched the topic, lol) and couldn't really find anything to do with this. So I have a gaming PC in my room, and as my room is on the third floor of my house, my connection to my router isn't very great. My house is pretty old, and I don't have wall wired ethernet. So my options right now are powerline and wifi. I am currently using a powerline connection to reach my router.

 

Here's my problem. I'm only getting speeds of 29Mbs on my powerline connection, and I am getting speeds of 32Mbs on my wifi connection from my PC (it has both, I installed a PCI wifi adapter) However, my internet connection is rated at 65Mbs. Therefore, you can see that I am losing about 40Mbs because I can't get a good connection to my router. When I use my laptop while I am near the router, speeds boost up to 65, sometimes even 70Mbs. So I know it is the connection between my PC and the router that is bottlenecking. I was hoping if there is someway to combine the two connections, the increase the grand total connection speed to approx 60Mbs. I'm still losing about 5Mbs, but it's nowhere near the speed of just a single connection. I have tried just using both connections at the same time, but this does not appear to work, as the PC only uses one connection

I have absolutely no idea how to do this, so I will be grateful if someone can help me out. 

 

N.B I am currently using the powerline connection, because it is a lot more stable than the wifi connection, even though the wifi is a little faster. I get better pings and less lag when playing games on the ethernet, as well as no rubberbanding, which i get on the wifi connection

[Adraen]

Hi @TheSpectre

 

You should be able to group multiple connections together with NIC teaming that is available in recent versions of windows (IIRC server 2012 R2 and windows 10), but considering the networks you have it's not something I would very much recommend. (if you don't use windows you can do the same with OpenVSwitch for instance but if you have never done any networking before that might be a bit tough)

 

NIC teaming is mostly useful when you have ~equivalent connections, as the different flows are load-balanced across the different links that are available (well there are multiple types of load balancing you can choose from with different rules) but considering that you have a not great (low throughput) powerline adapter and a not reliable (high latency, high jitter) wifi connection you will never really know what to expect per-flow so you might end up having a reasonable throughput but fairly bad and varying performance (which isn't great at all for gaming/VoIP for instance)

 

How old are your powerline adapters? I'm wondering if the low performances you're getting is due to the adapters being from an older gen, or it's because the electrical in your house isn't great and therefore the signal degrades significantly. Might be worthwhile checking few things out if your adapters are good, such as which plug it's connected to (avoid multi plug it kills performance)

[Oshino Shinobu]

You can use load balancing (supported natively in newer versions of Windows), which can increase your bandwidth for multiple data streams. What it will not do, though, is combine the connections for a single stream. If we imagine that both links are 30Mbps (for sake of keeping things simple), then you could have two downloads going at 30Mbps at the same time, rather than a single one at 30Mbps or two at 15Mbps each. However, if you only had one download going, you'd be capped by a single link, as both cannot be used in that case. 

 

There's a way to basically split a single transfer to work with load balancing, effectively increasing the bandwidth for a single stream, but I don't think Windows supports it and it's likely only useful in very specific situations. 

 

There is also link aggregation, which will combine multiple connections (typically advised to use identical connections) so that they act as a single link, so can be used by single streams. However, this requires both the client and the device it is connect to to support a link aggregation protocol. In your case, it would require the router to support it, something that (AFAIK) no consumer routers do. Even if it did, it's normally limited to ethernet, or at least two of the same type of connection. Linking a wireless and wired connection isn't supported. 

 

My advice would be to look into running a wire to your router. If it's really not an option, maybe consider investing in an access point and putting it as close to your PC as you can (bear in mind, access points require a wired link). 

[tt2468]

Simple Answer: You cannot combine two connections together to form a faster link. It just doesn't work that way.

[TheSpectre]

22 hours ago, TheSpectre said:

Hi guys. I searched high and low on the forums (well, really i just searched the topic, lol) and couldn't really find anything to do with this. So I have a gaming PC in my room, and as my room is on the third floor of my house, my connection to my router isn't very great. My house is pretty old, and I don't have wall wired ethernet. So my options right now are powerline and wifi. I am currently using a powerline connection to reach my router.

 

Here's my problem. I'm only getting speeds of 29Mbs on my powerline connection, and I am getting speeds of 24Mbs on my wifi connection from my PC (it has both, I installed a PCI wifi adapter) However, my internet connection is rated at 65Mbs. Therefore, you can see that I am losing about 40Mbs because I can't get a good connection to my router. When I use my laptop while I am near the router, speeds boost up to 65, sometimes even 70Mbs. So I know it is the connection between my PC and the router that is bottlenecking. I was hoping if there is someway to combine the two connections, the increase the grand total connection speed to approx 50Mbs. I'm still losing about 10Mbs, but not as much as before. I have tried just using both connections at the same time, but this does not appear to work, as the PC only uses one connection

I have absolutely no idea how to do this, so I will be grateful if someone can help me out. 

 

 

Hi, thanks for the reply. I actually don't know what is wrong with the performance. Testing with my laptop, my laptop gets well above 50Mbs in my room, but my PC is lacking behind very much. It is very sad to see that my lightweight laptop gets a lot more speed than the PC that i use to keep al my games on. The powerline adaptor is relatively new, only a couple of years old i would say, and is rated at 100Mbs, so I am not sure what is limiting the connection. It could be very bad internet, I'm not sure

[TheSpectre]

@Adraen @Oshino Shinobu @tt2468

Ok, since we have estabalished that what I am trying to achieve is impossible/unreccommended, how about I use both connections? Say, for google chrome, steam, and other apps that usually have downloads and surfing use wifi, as it is the 20mbs faster than the ethernet connection, and games, like CSGO, Payday, ect use the ethernet connection for stability? Is that possible?

[Adraen]

54 minutes ago, TheSpectre said:

@Adraen @Oshino Shinobu @tt2468

Ok, since we have estabalished that what I am trying to achieve is impossible/unreccommended, how about I use both connections? Say, for google chrome, steam, and other apps that usually have downloads and surfing use wifi, as it is the 20mbs faster than the ethernet connection, and games, like CSGO, Payday, ect use the ethernet connection for stability? Is that possible?

Yes it is but that would be a very very huge pain to configure.

 

First off, if you say the your laptop is much better at receiving the wifi than your desktop could simply be that your desktop's wifi card isn't great. Have a look at what it is, check in the settings of the card if you can increase the transmit power make sure that it's not obstructed (if you have a wifi usb dongle that's probably already the problem). 

 

I think you should do some experiments in your local network to see what's the problem excluding the internet connection from the loop. Take your laptop or whatever computer and plug it to your router with an ethernet cable. On your laptop run a bandwidth testing tool (iperf in server mode for instance) and on your desktop do a throughput measurement with the laptop, this will give you the speed your local network can achieve. You could also do a ping to see the jitter (to game you want your latency to be stable)

 

You said before that you could get about ~25mbps so that's what you should see on your local network. Do the test over wifi and powerline you should get the values you mentioned before. Then you can start fixing what's wrong, move the powerline adapter between sockets in the room (not on the same multi plug ofc) and the other one close to the router to avoid as much interference as possible (for instance a power brick (transformer) inline with the adapter will kill the performance) and you can try the same with the WiFi, remove obstacles, change the antenna's direction ...

[TheSpectre]

unfortunately, my laptop is a MacBook. And apple decided to leave out the ethernet port on my line of laptops. My PC has a PCI-E wifi card, and the wifi card was bought a cheap replacement until i get my powerline adaptors. However, it appears to be a lot faster than the powerline adaptors. Upon further inspection of the powerline adaptors, it seems that the adaptors are actually rated at 500Mbs, so this confuses me more. I am confident that the problem is just in the shoddy wiring of the house. @Adraen

[Cubed_]

Maybe this will help / work: http://speedify.com/desktop/

[TheSpectre]

On 06/09/2016 at 1:51 AM, Cubed_ said:

Maybe this will help / work: http://speedify.com/desktop/

Thanks for this! I will check it out