Laptop and wifi

English Network/Internet
1

I have an old HP laptop with a Broadcom wifi card. I keep it updated via yast. Downloading is very slow. I have a Linksys 6100 router and its position in the house doesn’t matter because the laptop performance is the same if I have it just inches from the router.

I say all this as background because my question is mostly about something else. I have a few old usb wifi dongles . The D-Link one gave the biggest boost to the download speeds. The internal wifi connects to my main wifi and the dongle connects to the Guest account. This happens automatically. How can I tell if the wifi is “bonding” or if the laptop is just picking the fastest one? If its not bonding, can I force it? I’m probably using the word “bonding” incorrectly but do I have 2 internet connections or just one? I haven’t tried to force a 5G connection. Would that be better?

This is mostly conversation to understand wifi. I don’t expect to get a truly fast connection until I get a newer laptop.

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@Prexy run the command ip a should show what interfaces have ip addresses, I would suggest just using one or the other.

3

Hi Prexi,

I don’t know the Linksys router. But if I understand correctly it also provides the guest account, right? So it’s just two separate connection to the same hardware accesspoint. On your laptop you may be using two interfaces but I’m pretty sure it’s just one at the router. Without solid proof I’d say this can’t be faster. After all, the router must split the bandwidth and “rejoin” the two data streams. I’d guess it might best be same speed, maybe rather slower. That provided the laptop would really be “bonding” the interfaces. AFAIK it doesn’t do this out of the box, if possible at all. A 5 GHz connection sure would be an improvement. After all, I’d say this will be down to the actual specs of your hardware.

Whoops, Malcolm was faster…

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