Friday 6 May 2011

How to get a Belkin N+ Router to work with the IPhone and XBox Live

I had a bit of a time trying to get my new Belkin N+ router (F5D8236uk4) to replace my beloved Linksys with custom DD-WRT firmware. My biggest issues were getting it to work smoothly with my iPhone and to work at all with XBox Live on my XBox 360. After searching through many forum posts I found at that many people have had similar issues. So although this is about the Belkin router I am sure that many of the same issues resolved here can apply to other routers, especially newer models.

iPhone issues

This was a bit of a long running and frustrating issue. Basically the iPhone would connect to the router and have lightening fast internet access thanks to the improved wifi capablilites of the Belkin, but after going to sleep and reconnecting, it would either take ages to connect and when it did there would be LAN access but no internet access OR would ask for the network password each time. The short term fixes seemed to be forgetting the network settings on the iPhone, rebooting the rooter or clicking on the renew lease button on the iPhone. So, this indicated to me that the router was experiencing DHCP issues, however none of our other devices were having problems! To rule it out I set a static IP address and hardcoded in the DNS address into the iPhone (the actual broadband provider's DNS not just the IP of the router). If you're not following this, don't worry it's not the solution unlike many forum post were seeming to indicate!

Now I had ruled this out the next natural thing to try was changing the broadcast mode of the router from b, g and n to b only as suggested by other posters. The rationale being that maybe the iPhone could not handle more advanced brodcast modes. Again as for the previous 'fix' this worked for a short period but sporadic connection faliures crept back in. So what could it be??

I had set up my router, naturally, to use the best for of wifi security available WPA2 as of course we all want the best security possible. All our laptops and even the XBox had no problem with this but it turns out that iOS4 cannot handle it. The clue here was the constant need to re-input the newtork password. So changing from WPA2 to the slighlty older but still pretty strong WPA encryption did the trick. You don't, as some people suggest, need to resort to the ancient WEP protocol. The iPhone now works like a dream.

XBox 360

For some reason, unknown to me I never had to port forward with my old Linksys, but after a bit of searching on the unusually good Microsoft support site, I learnt that I needed to set up port forwarding to allow connections to XBox Live. Actually, you don't need to do this. On your XBox go to configure network and set up a static IP address. If your DHCP server on the router assigns address up to xxx.xxx.xxx.200 for example then set the static address on your XBox to be xxx.xxx.xxx.201 to avoid conflicts. Next go to the router and set up a Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), setting the local address to be the one you choose on your XBox. Hey presto! Your XBox should now work fine without needing to to mess about with port forwarding, just don't forget to enable uPNP (it should be enabled by default).

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