To let a Mac automatically use Wifi and Ethernet to double the connection speed?

I am staying at a hotel, and for some reason, I think they limit each Wifi connection to 95 kbyte / s. So that is roughly 1.2 Mbps... and since I have 18 Mbps at home, I am using a speed that is less than 1/10 of the speed at home.

So I asked at the front desk to see if they have a room with a wired connection, and the answer is yes, and I switched to this room, and even bought a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter for the Macbook Air to be able to use the Ethernet wired connection.

But to my surprise, the speed of that connection is just the same: 95 kbyte / s. Is there an easy way to tell OS X to automatically use both connections so that the speed can be doubled?

For example, if one tab in Chrome uses one connection and the downloading file in Chrome uses another connection. Or if Chrome uses one connection and Firefox uses another one, that might work too. Or can the OS be smart and just "merge" the 2 connections transparently?

(or if the OS "randomly" uses one or the other connection each time a connection is made, then the effect is roughly achieved too).


Solution 1:

From Super User: If I have two internet connections on osx, how can I use both to increase my bandwidth?:

Short answer: no. With 2 links, you have 2 IP addresses. It can be done with some specific higher end NICs (e.g. Intel quad cards), but they will appear to the rest of the network as a single IP address in that mode. If the assumption is that you have 2 distinct IP addresses, it cannot be done

Solution 2:

If you are using VMWare or Parallels you can connect a virtual machine directly to one specific network interface (WiFi in the example)

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and use the other interface as the default for OS X:

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In the specific situation described in the question it may be too much of a hassle though.