On the three interfaces: others have pointed that out too, and we’ll try to make it clearer in the article. In this test the laptop had three Wi-Fi adapters, each pinned to a different AP. There’s nothing particularly special about three though - with two adapters connected to two different APs you should already be able to get a lot of the benefit.

On the IP side, the overlay works a bit like a VPN. Traffic is sent over all the available interfaces to software on the other side, which combines the paths and presents a normal IP stream towards the final destination. Encryption isn’t the primary purpose here - the main goal is making the connection more robust - although encryption can of course be added.

The pinned-AP comparison is a fair criticism. For this demo we deliberately kept each interface associated with one AP because we wanted to isolate the effect of using several paths at once, rather than also introducing the behaviour of the Wi-Fi roaming implementation into the test. Comparing against normal roaming, including 802.11k/v/r, is definitely something we want to test next.

We want to experiment with a small daemon that keeps the different Wi-Fi interfaces associated with different APs. If one drops out, it can reassociate that interface with another available AP, so in principle you can move through a much larger Wi-Fi deployment while still maintaining multiple active paths.

We haven’t done a proper comparison against Wi-Fi 7 MLO yet, but that would be a very interesting comparison. Conceptually there is definitely some overlap, although our approach sits above the individual Wi-Fi link and can also combine completely different networks.

What we’re doing is slightly different though. We’re not only reacting to signal strength or a broken connection. Because we have multiple active paths, we can also move real-time traffic away from a Wi-Fi path that is still connected but has temporarily become bad - for example because that AP is congested or somebody else is consuming a lot of airtime.

So even if the roaming itself is perfect, you can still have a path that is technically connected but no longer able to meet the latency budget.

Another advantage is that this doesn’t depend on the AP infrastructure supporting fast roaming or coordination features. It works above the Wi-Fi layer, and the same mechanism can also combine Wi-Fi with completely different networks such as 5G or Starlink.