Connecting multiple Xbox’s to Xbox live

If you’re like me, you don’t like sharing your stuff. That’s why I bought my own Xbox, controller, and TV. What I didn’t realize before buying all this stuff, is that I’d still have to share the time that I spent connected to Xbox Live. In lots of home networks, you can’t get more than one Xbox on Xbox live at a time. I’ve seen some people talk about putting one on wireless and one on a wired connection and making it work. I’ve heard other people talk about putting one Xbox in the DMZ (a section of your network that is basically unprotected) and making it work.

Both situations are not ideal for a few different reasons. For starters, I attempted both just to see if they would work, and I never could get it work (although I didn’t spend much time trying, as I already had a workable solution). In both situations, you still can’t connect more than 2 Xbox’s to your network at a time, and in one solution you have to deal with wireless while the other you leave your Xbox unprotected. I don’t know exactly just how big of a risk it is to leave an Xbox in the DMZ, but why not play it safe?

The real solution requires a router with good enough software to allow enabling UPnP (some routers just have this enabled by default, even though it may not be an option), allow customization of the MTU size (to help fight against lag if you get any), and do port range triggering, which is the most important part. Unfortunately, I can’t guarantee your router can do this. In fact, unless you went out and bought a good quality router (versus taking whatever your ISP might give you, or buying whatever was cheapest at the time), you probably can’t do port range triggering. If this is the case, then I highly recommend you invest about 80 bucks into the Cisco-Linksys E3000 Wireless-N Router. It’s an older model, but it was top of the line when it came out and this is the one I currently use. This bad boy was at least a few hundred bucks just a few years ago, if not more. If price isn’t an object for you, I’d recommend going with the Cisco-Linksys E4200 Dual-Band Wireless-N Router. It’s newer, sleeker, faster, and twice as expensive.

So what do you do with the information above? Well you don’t need to know what exactly port range triggering or UPnP does, or what MTU is. You just need to know how to configure it. Writing down the entire process would be a bit lengthy, so instead I made a tutorial posted on Youtube. Once it’s uploaded, I’ll embed it below so you can watch it here. Enjoy! Oh, and one more thing, this also resolves any NAT issues you might be experiencing.