Because it’s not useful. Two routers still share the same frequencies and thus can’t send more data over the same air. A single router can already use multiple frequencies to increase throughput. You don’t need two to do that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIMO
If you want to use multiple internet connections and combine their speed, that’s possible. Dunno how though and I guess to work best it would need a server somewhere else like a VPN to manage the packets coming from different ips
Software defined wan (SDWAN) is the industry term for bundling multiple independent internet connections to maximise bandwidth.
Can you explain what this “software defined x” means that you hear everywhere?
Basically it means to not have a special designed hardware for task X but to do much of it in software which gives you more flexibility. And also let’s you configure and use X a bit more flexible.
E.g. software defined networking: If you run several virtual machines on a server, you may define the whole network between them virtually in software instead of doing it on the hardware side. Sure, you still need an ethernet card in your server to connect it to other servers and the internet, but all load balancing, switches, firewalls, VLANs, etc. between the virtual machines (or containers) on your server are virtualized in software - or maybe eben between servers.
Same goes for e.g. Software Defined Radio. In the early days you had dedicated hardware to control the mobile network and the antennas and such. Today you “just” have the antenna and a transceiver that is capable of producing and receiving a wide range of signals and modulations. All encoding, decoding and interpretation the signals is done in software. If your hardware is capable enough, the upgrade from e.g. 4G to 5G may only be a software update for all base stations.
The main ones I hear are software defined WAN. Which means you can do per application internet steering.
Software defined LAN is more about authorising specific applications to access the corporate lan.
SD-WAN includes that but it is not its sole purpose, although I agree most vendors will say that’s what you want. WAN/Link Aggregation, Multilink Aggregation, Link Load Balancing, Equal Cost Multipath, WAN Virtualisation, etc are ways to bundle multiple links together.
In WIFI terms, it’s called channel bonding, it was proprietary and various vendors had their own implementations, see “Super G”.
I agree but most of the wan optimisers have rebranded to SDWAN because that was the hype about 7 years ago.
With wifi specifically yea, trying to multiplex a technology that is effectively a CSMA/CA is hard and there is no interoperability.
Two APs should be on different channels so they don’t interfere
This exists, kind of
There’s bonded connections in several senses
Bonded ports but this doesn’t increase throughput in the way you’re thinking. eg if I bond 2 1 gigabit Ethernet ports I can’t connect at 2 gigabits, I can connect 2 users at up to one gigabit each (or several users totaling 2 gigabits but no 1 user at more than 1 gigabit)
bonding routers can take two internet connections and combine them, which is closer to what you are probably imagining. They combine throughput, eg a 100mbit connection and a 100mbit connection become a 200mbit connection although realistically it’s not that perfect and you have to get the right services for it, not just any connection will work, it’s a rabbit hole and generally much slower and worse latency than if you just got a traditional connection. Think people using starlink and 5g internet in rural settings
There’s also something called speedify, which is software that claims to do the above in software alone, bonds two connections to combine throughput. Never tried it, reviews are mixed. Some say it works, some say it’s spotty, some say you only get the speed of the one connection, etc.
We had a guest speaker from ericson back when I was in uni. According to them that’s been a thing for a while now
We’ve been doing better time sharing since WiFi 6. Remember this all has to be backwards compatible.
WiFi 7 has its own new band and its really fast.
IIRC wifi6 added the option for backplaning to be a different frequency, but not everyone implemented it. 6e even added 7ghz but basically nobody implemented it. So even with brand new equipment, you were super at the mercy of your end user devices and whether or not your mesh was physical or wireless and whether or not the mesh nodes themselves supported the same backplaning channels.
Hm yeah of course.
My guess is that a network card can handle only one network at a time
Yeah it would probably be better to do in the router.
I wonder if you configure them to be a trunk
probably because it’s more complicated than just improving the bandwidth on single wifi networks, which we have been making steady progress on. picking the low hanging fruit first.
