Raymond.CC Blog

About 10 years ago when most people are still using dial-up and broadband is only available in Klang valley, I was one of the lucky user that is staying in an area which is within the broadband coverage area. I remembered I was paying a lot monthly for using dial-up connection and was really happy when the broadband package is cheaper than what I paid, faster connection and I can use it 24 hours a day without limit. I had a question in mind which is if I have both dial up and broadband connected, would Windows use the bandwidth simultaneously or only use one of it? If Windows only uses one of it, which connection would it use and why?

I found out that it has something to do with the Windows Routing Table. It is possible to switch between the connections by changing the route and setting the lowest metric value for the default route. To do that, Windows comes with a command line route.exe utility which I would say it may not be easy to use for people who do not understand IP routing table.


Thanks to Nir Sofer, he has recently released a Network Route Utility for Windows called NetRouteView which is a GUI alternative to the standard route utility (Route.exe) of Windows operating system. It displays the list of all routes on your current network, including the destination, mask, gateway, interface IP address, metric value, type, protocol, age (in seconds), interface name, and the MAC address. NetRouteView also allows you to easily add new routes, as well as to remove or modify existing static routes.

Here is an example of the connections on my test computer. I have a wireless broadband (Celcom), WLAN connection (Wi-Fi) and a wired LAN, all 3 connected at the same time. How do we know which connection is being used when all 3 are connected?

Using NetRouteView, we would only need to look for the default route that has the lowest metric, which means that is the connection with the priority of being used. The routes with destination and mask 0.0.0.0 are the default routes so by clicking on the Destination column, it would sort and automatically place all 0.0.0.0 at the top for easy viewing. Next see which metric is the lowest. The interface IP would identify which connection is it.

Go to run by pressing WIN+R and type cmd to open the command prompt. Type ipconfig and it shows all the connection with the IP address. As you can see, the default route with metric 1 is my Celcom 3G wireless broadband, followed by metric 11 with the IP address 192.168.2.2 which is my wired LAN connection and finally metric 20 which is my wireless LAN (wi-fi). If I disconnect my wireless broadband, the next connection that will be automatically used is the wired LAN.

If you want all 3 connections to be connected and wants to use wireless lan, you can either double click on the route and change the metric to a lower number. Metric 1 is the lowest, so if there is already a connection with metric 1, the easiest way is to switch the metric values by pressing and holding the CTRL key while clicking the on the connections. Then you can either press F9 or right click and select “Switch Metric Values”.

If somehow you screwed up the routing tables, a reboot would automatically fix it because the changes that you made with NetRouteView is only temporary and not persistent. By the way, Cain & Able, a password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating Systems also has a GUI for editing the Routing Table called Route Table MAnager. It can be access from Tools menubar and select Route Table or you can use the hotkey Alt+R.

[ Download NetRouteView | Cain & Able ]