Your Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and Hotspot Are Sitting There Unused—Why Not Add Them Up?

You've got Wi-Fi, an Ethernet cable, and maybe a phone hotspot within reach. Most of the time, your machine picks one and ignores the rest. So what happens if you could actually use all of them at once? That's the premise behind net-merge, an open-source tool that combines your network adapters so downloads, games, and browsers can pull from every connection you've got.

What It Does

net-merge is a cross-platform utility for Windows, macOS, and Linux that uses all your network adapters together. You don't set up a proxy, and there's no account, no server, and no VPN involved. It works at the connection level: every new connection an app opens gets assigned to one of your links, so when an app opens many connections, they spread across everything you've got.

It handles TCP and UDP, IPv4 and IPv6, and works for every app without per-app configuration. The logic is adaptive too—faster links get more connections, and a link that's lost its internet gets none until it recovers. There's a menu bar or tray icon showing total throughput and per-adapter speeds, plus options like an IPv6 toggle and a pause switch. In a real test combining Wi-Fi, an Android USB tether, and an iPhone hotspot across nine simultaneous downloads, it hit 232-303 Mbit/s—where the fastest single connection alone managed about 121 Mbit/s.

Why It's Cool

• It's honest about what it can't do. The README says it plainly: this is not for a single connection. One connection always uses one link, so a single big file from a single connection won't get faster. That kind of upfront limitation is refreshing—you know exactly what you're getting.

• It targets the workloads that actually benefit. Steam and game downloads, browsers, system updates, cloud uploads, download managers like IDM, torrents—anything that opens many connections at once. These are exactly the cases where parallel links pay off, and the tool is designed around them.

• No proxy setup. It works for every app, TCP and UDP included, without you configuring anything per-application. That's a big deal compared to the usual fiddly multi-WAN setups.

• It fails safe. If net-merge crashes, your internet keeps working. For something sitting between your machine and the network, that's the right design decision.

• It's light. About 0.18 CPU cores per 100 Mbit/s. You're not paying a heavy tax for the extra throughput.

• The adaptive link selection is the quiet win. Giving faster links more connections and pulling dead links out of rotation automatically means you don't have to babysit it when your hotspot drops or your Wi-Fi gets flaky.

How to Try It

Installation is a one-liner. On macOS and Linux, paste this into a terminal:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rohit267/net-merge/main/install.sh | sh

On Windows, paste this into PowerShell:

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rohit267/net-merge/main/install.ps1 | iex

That's it—net-merge installs and its icon appears in your menu bar or tray. On Linux the script uses your package manager (apt, dnf, zypper, apk, or pacman). Once it's running, add a second connection (a hotspot or tether works fine) and watch the menu to see both links carrying traffic.

There's also a 45-second demo video and a "How it works" doc in the repo if you want to understand the internals before committing. Head to the repository to grab the latest release.

Final Thoughts

net-merge isn't magic, and it doesn't pretend to be—it won't speed up a single stream, and the README is upfront about that. But if your work involves big downloads, game libraries, torrents, or cloud syncs, and you've got more than one usable connection lying around, it's a genuinely practical way to put them all to work. The free, no-account, no-VPN approach and the fail-safe design make it easy to try without much risk. It's the kind of tool that solves one specific problem well, and for the right user, that's plenty.

Follow @githubprojects for more developer tools and open source projects.