Having College ISP issues. Please help.

So my cousin and his buddies are going to the same college and we all want to play games together over Xbox Live.

Well, none of them can connect to each other because the internet is the same single internet throughout the whole college.

I've been googling for days now but there is no good answers for this problem out there it seems like. If there is I can't find it.

I'm not a techie so I really don't know what to do to help them get this working. I dont know if its a NAT issue or firewall or what.

They told the IT guys on campus and the IT guys said they don't know what they are really talking about and not sure what they could do to fix it.

So does anyone on this forum know how to solve this? Or how to explain it better to the IT guys? Or what to tell them exactly to do to fix this?

Thanks a bunch

 

From my experience dealing with such problems, I think you are on the right track, thinking of firewall and NAT issues, first. http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/xbox_support/f/9/p/157383/824540.aspx shows how to test the connection from an Xbox or PC to find out what kind of NAT you have, to help narrow down the problem. Some game services use some sort of NAT traversal proxy, but I don't know exactly what Xbox Live has. You could ask the IT guys if UDP ports 88 and 3074 and TCP port 3074 are blocked by the firewall. More information about Xbox Live ports is given at http://support.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-live/connecting/network-ports-used-xbox-live and http://compnetworking.about.com/b/2008/11/15/tcp-and-udp-port-numbers-for-xbox-live.htm, including the comments.

 

It is not that the IT group does not have a clue. It is that IT is not going to allow heavy load on the network for things like Peer to Peer, or gaming system use. Colleges & Universities tend to use traffic shaping, so that students that need to work on papers, research stuff, can be able to get that info.

 

Brownizs is right. I also suspect the IT people aren't going to make any allowances. School networks are not very good places for games, especially those that take a lot of bandwidth. If they are educational or part of some kind of study, they may make some exceptions, but that wouldn't apply in this case. Even if IPv6 were used, eliminating NAT issues, bandwidth would still need to be controlled, meaning low priority stuff like games could be unreliable or blocked entirely.

Since, in this case, multiple devices are on the school network, it's even more reason for them to be cautious. One device of this sort on the Internet may even be too many for some networks.

 

PC-XT, my son told me that Lincoln Christian University, up in Lincoln, IL, their network is so bad, that even if you try to check email, or browse the web, you can barely get 1mb down.

I know that some schools are great about having large amounts of bandwidth available for their users, but there is also a large majority, that are using Traffic Shaping, to stop users from abusing the network.

 

Back when i was in college we constantly had issues in our dorms with gaming. What we ended up doing was finding a teacher that was cool enough to be into gaming, started a school club over it. This allowed us to get funding from the sga and allowed us to make friends the colleges it department and made it much easier for us to get ports open and allowed by showing the benefit of having a school gaming club. This also lead to at least one of the founding members getting a career in networking and benefited many of us with networking skills as well. I dont know much about the xbox aspect, but dont let the it department or school get you down. Look into starting a club!

 

Now of course, if they could just get a off campus setup for a Gaming Lab, that would be much better. Plus side is, if those that belong to this club got into the programming side, it would allow them to develop better apps for use on the units.

Instead of running a game on a disc alone, one thing that most developers do not look at, is incorporating some of the api's out there, to allow you to also utilize social media, or even things like online media streaming.

What I am waiting for, is for someone to figure a way to incorporate items like ATT U-Verse online browser based media streaming into the gaming and Blu-Ray platforms. Or even build a better way of streaming media from say the Android, iOS platforms, along with Linux & Windows 7/8 to these gaming systems.

As they say, if you build it, they will come.