Multiple Wi-Fi cards and Internet connections on Windows 7

I have two Wi-Fi cards and two separate Internet connections.

I connect to the Internet with both of them but one does all of the Internet transactions (and I have not seen any place where I can specify which one I would prefer to use!)

What I would like to do is use one of them for the browser and Skype only, and the other one for stock exchange software for instance.

Is this is possible?

Solution 1:

Try this: First identify the IP destination address of the sites your applications connect to. For example Scottrade = 208.88.144.78 (you can do this by opening a CMD window in W7 and then using the NSLOOKUP utility:

c/> nslookup scottrade.com Enter

Do this for as many applications you are concerned with. then decide which connection you want to use for each app. Make two lists, apps for NIC A, and apps for NIC B.

Next, decide which NIC you want to use for your DEFAULT gateway (you can only have one DG even if you have multiple NICs in W7) then display your PC's routing table: in a CMD window type:

Route Print

The top of the resulting display will show your interfaces: physicals first and logicals last. Below that you will see the IPv4 routing table. Look at the FIRST LINE of the table. This is your CURRENT default gateway, NOTE which interface it is attached to (look at the "interface" column)...now the FUN part!

Take your lists and assign list A to ONE of your interfaces, and list B to the OTHER interface....decide also whether your DEFAULT Gateway will be on A or B.

Now, For whatever list DOES NOT contain the default gateway, you need to ADD HOST ROUTES to the routing table. For example, if you want to access scottrade on the NIC that does NOT have the default gateway, at the CMD line you will add the following:

C/> Route Add 208.88.144.78 Mask 255.255.255.255 IF <ip address of your selected NIC> -p

NOTE the -p at the end...if you do not do this W7 will "forget" this route on reboot.

Solution 2:

This is not easily doable, your computer will have a local address (127.0.0.1 with a subnet mask of 255.0.0.0) and any traffic that needs to be routed outside of the address range (eg public IP addresses) will go to an adapter that has an external gateway. In this case you have two internet connections, both with external gateways. Windows will determine which one routes the data based off the interface metric (unless the traffic belongs to the subnet of the interface).

You would need some very specialised software to do this.

(and I have not seen any place where I can specify which one I would prefer to use!)

As I said above, Windows uses the Interface Metric. See here on how to change it.