Business Development Specialist

I feel the need to have a bit of a vent!!  I am sure I am not the only person on this planet that has bought a plug ‘n play item that quite frankly doesn’t quite hit the mark and leads to some serious disappointment.

This little yarn begins when I decided to jump ship from Slingshot to Telstraclear to take advantage of their fibre network with faster and more reliable broadband.  This was particularly important for two reasons, firstly I work from home and I need a good consistent broadband platform to do a lot of my research and secondly (and just as important) I am an on line gamer, I thoroughly enjoy my time blasting and shooting things and other people on line it’s a great stress relief.

So here I am waiting for the big day to arrive, the installer comes in and plugs our house into the fibre loop which will give me 3 times faster down load speeds and 4 times faster upload (especially important for my gaming requirements).  Just before he leaves he tells my my old router wont cut the mustard and I will need a new one, he tells me what I need and I happily go off to the shops and by a new one.

On my return I rip the packaging to pieces in my haste to get the system set up, once it is set up (which was easy) I had to load some software onto my laptop to access the router and set up the network.  Everything went according to plan, I did my speed test, wella I have faster broadband yippeee!!  I hooked on my wifes laptop to the network that to worked straight away, I know what your thinking what’s your problem everything is working well ………. and yes I agree it was right up to the point when I switched on my Xbox!!

Four days later I finally get on to the Xbox, it’s Wednesday night, Xbox night, the night a group of us jump on line and create mayhem and carnage but it would eventuate not for me, at least not for the first 2.5hrs!!!

I appreciate that my internet connection was working, but in this day and age when gaming on line is taking over the world why oh why is there no instructions or recommendation on how to configure your router for gaming!!

Now there is a little feature called a NAT which stands for Network Address Translation and for good gaming connection this NAT setting needs to be on “open” or at very least “moderate” as this will allow you to talk to your friends privately and set up private games if you have had enough of scrapping in the general arena, but what know one tells you is that the ports required to do this are closed by default (this reduces the risk of people hacking into your network) so of course that means you can’t play with your mates aaaargh!!!!

The Fix

The fix took me nearly 3hrs to get right, 3hrs of down game time, not good when you only get one night a week to have a real good blast!!  Now I’m no computer guru, my terminology is likely to be all wrong but I will add a couple of screen shots to try and explain what I did, so here it goes!!

After doing the obvious things like resetting the Xbox360 and switching the modem and the router off more 10 seconds I Googled the problem, man I don’t no what we would do without Google!!  It was not easy to find something relevant but after a bit of perseverance I found an article that looked like it might fit the problem.

1. Access your router through it’s IP address which will look something like 192.168.2.1 (if you double click on your local area connection or wireless connection icon and then click on the Support tab at the top it will tell you what your Default Gateway is, this is the IP address you need)
2. If you have never changed the password hit Enter (this is usually default) otherwise type your password in.
3. I have a Belkin router so I needed to click on  Virtual Servers, here you need to specify a couple of ports to use ONLY on the IP address that your Xbox360 uses, the image below shows what I did:
   

   Don't put in the first setting, it did not work (hence it is not enabled)

4. There is a DMZ setting that can be enabled for the IP address of your Xbox360 only, what this does is places your Xbox360 outside your firewall (this does expose it to potential hackers) but it will remove any problems you have with your on line experience.  Here is an image of this setting: 5.  Save changes and quit, this will ensure that your Xbox360 gaming experience will work smoothly without compromising any other computer on your network.

…… But why can’t these manufacturers put some specific instructions with their product advising gamers that it may be necessary to make these adjustments BEFORE they try and play on line!!

Happy gaming everyone