Dell Inspiron 1520 - dual wlan cards?

Hi,

Is it possible to have to wireless NICs in this machine? There's a free slot for another card (documentation at Documentation ):

If they're all PCI-E mini, and physically fits, then why shouldn't it support 2 network cards?

Of course, if this works, there's the antenna issue. There's two WWAN antenna cable available, but I'm not sure if they'll work...

Any thoughts?

 

http://en.community.dell.com/suppor...hannel-bonding-using-dual-wlan-mini-pcie.aspx

Was doing this a couple years back with Studio 1735 notebook. It only really makes sense if you are using WLAN teaming software in order to operate over just a single IP address when connecting to a dual-band wireless router...

 

Hm, so it works. Why can't I connect to two different APs simultaneously?

 

You could but this wouldn't increase your bandwidth/throughput since windows would only actively use 1 of your WLAN NICs to pass data at any one time. The second WLAN would just sit there and not be passing any packets...

 

I know.

But, so in practice, it'll work fine. It's like having two network cards then. (with which you could do whatever you want; failover, bonding, forwarding etc)

 

So, if you were connected to two wireless networks, it would actually be slower as it would be add a layer of complexity.

It is possible for sure. Like stated above, there isn't much benefit unless you are running a server OS or running other software to use both NICs.

 

Well, you could be on a wireless network on one card (connected), and scan for weak APs with the other one (for playing around with WPA decryption at home for example).

But anyways, thanks, now I know that it works