WiFi channel bonding with netgraph - possible ? Back end needed ?

[Gore Jarold]

Let's say I live in a dorm room, or a large condo building.

And let's say that everyone has the same ISP, and everyone is getting 3 mbps down and 512 kbps up, and there is no possibility of a better connection.

And finally, let's say that everyone is running wide open wifi access points.

Would it be possible to equip a computer with four (or more) wireless ethernet cards, jump on four open APs simultaneously, and bond them all together with netgraph to get a 12 mbps down and 2 mbps up connection ?

The two main conceptual questions I have about this are:

- do I need a back end somewhere (a collocated server) to tie all four connections back together into one again ?  If I round-robin through the cards for each network request that would not _truly_ give me a bonded connection, and I wouldn't often get the full bonded bandwidth (unless I was doing lots of tiny, concurrent network transfers).  It would seem that if I wanted to truly bond the connections into one, I would need them all to talk to some central server that would represent it to the world as a single IP ...

- I have read that bonding wireless cards with netgraph is not as easy as bonding normal ethernet cards, because you need to arbitrarily assign and re-assign MAC addresses over and over on the fly, and the firmwares of many wireless cards do not allow one to do this ... I believe I saw a posting from a few years back that indicated Lucent cards (for instance) could not do this ...

Comments ?  The idea is to bond things into one, single, usable connection that could provide multiple connections worth of bandwidth for single-threaded network transactions (like downloading a single file from an ftp server).  Perhaps there is a better tool to do this with than netgraph ?

       
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