Firewalls and Gaming

Many broadband routers have firewalls built into them. This is good because it adds an extra layer of security between your WLAN and the Internet. However, the firewall can occasionally get in the way of gaming by blocking software ports that a game wants to use.

Ports are numbered connections that computers use for different types of network traffic. For example, computers use port 80 for Web traffic and port 25 for e-mail. There are thousands of port numbers available, and a firewall closes most of them.

If a particular game requires a specific port be opened, you have to configure your firewall to allow traffic to pass through that port. How you configure the firewall depends on the model, but your documentation or the vendor's Web site should cover this. If your router and game software supports Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), then opening ports is easy because UPnP does it automatically when the game requires it. UPnP is a plug-and-play standard for network devices that allows them to be set up automatically with minimal user intervention.

It may be difficult to determine which port an application requires, in this case, you can try setting up a demilitarized zone (DMZ), as explained in the next section.