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Windows 7 hotspot hacker turns to software bonding

Wi-Fi, 4G, wired, whatever you've got – borged into one powerful stream

The company responsible for hacking a Wi-Fi hotspot into Windows 7 is turning its hand to software bonding, promising tens of megabits over the slowest of cellular connections.

The company has prototype Windows code which can bond multiple IP connections into a single stream, merging multiple Wi-Fi, cellular or physical connections to provide one IP address with serious connectivity, assuming one has the USB ports to spare:

Bonding IP connections together is nothing new, Be will happily glue together multiple ADSL lines for the home user who wants a little more poke, while SharedBand does the same thing across multiple ISPs for those who want reliability as well as speed. But those offerings require special routers and cloud-based aggregators, while Connectify's solution runs on a single PC.

Connectify reckons the software is ideal for bonding the coffee-shop Wi-Fi with a personal (4G?) Hotspot, or multiplying up several slow Wi-Fi connections, though to do that you'll have to have multiple Wi-Fi interface cards obviously. Anyone sitting in an office equipped with both Wi-Fi and wired access will see the utility in being able to load both at the same time, though with 100Mb/sec Ethernet now commonplace one has to question if the addition of Wi-Fi will make a significant difference.

Connectify certainly knows their Windows 7 IP stack, having stumbled across, and successfully exploited, the Wi-Fi hotspot code hidden within the Microsoft OS. That hack is now embodied in the eponymous Connectify Hotspot product, which comes with limited support for Vista and XP and costs $21 for the Pro version (there's a free version too).

Connectify Dispatch, as the company is calling its software bonding product, is currently selling for $40, bundled with Hotspot – despite being little more than a prototype at the moment. The company is hoping that pre-orders, and a Kickstarter page, will raise the money it needs to turn Dispatch into a real product, though a more compelling use case may also be needed to turn it mainstream. ®

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