Windows 7 Virtual WiFi lets you connect to multiple hotspots

mai 20 06:40 2009

Microsoft has been developing Virtual-WiFi or VWiFi technology since 2002 and is including this as a feature of Windows 7. According to Long Zheng, this feature has been in Windows 7 for quite a while but insufficient drivers have made it impossible for anyone to discover this feature on their own.

VWiFi will allow hardware adapters to act as separate WiFi adapters, thus giving the computer the ability to connect to multiple hotspots simultaneously. One of the most useful things you could do with VWiFi is to connect to a WiFi hotspot and also share the connection simultaneously with other laptops. This would definitely come in handy when dealing with paid WiFi hotspots. VWiFi also opens up the opportunity to create mesh networks.

We’ve yet to see this feature in action due to a lack of driver support. But the good news is that it will soon be a requirement for all WLAN drivers under the Windows 7 certification logo to support Virtual WiFi. The feature should automatically be activated once supported by the driver:

On Windows 7 and later, the operating system installs a virtual device if a Hosted Network capable wireless adapter is present on the machine. This virtual device normally shows up in the “Network Connections Folder” as ‘Wireless Network Connection 2’ with a Device Name of ‘Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport adapter’ if the computer has a single wireless network adapter. This virtual device is used exclusively for performing software access point (SoftAP) connections […]. The lifetime of this virtual device is tied to the physical wireless adapter. If the physical wireless adapter is disabled, this virtual device will be removed as well