Entire Wireless network dies

[Vcize]

Just installed a new Netgear WTG614 wireless router and everything in the setup went pretty smoothly. Howver, now whenever I play WC3 online it kills the whole network, even though I have the PC that I'm playing WC3 on hooked up through an ethernet cable to the router.

I forwarded the same ports for WC3 that I had forwarded with my own wired router that worked fine.

 

[Vcize]

No one has any ideas? I'm at a loss here.

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Let me see if I understand. When you play WC3 on your computer (which is connected to the router via CAT5) no one else can browse the Internet, but you can play your game right?

I have to assume that you're hogging all the bandwidth, but I'm not aware of WC3 being that big a bandwidth hog. However you may have used a tweak in the game that makes the game use more bandwidth than it should (I don't play WC3 but I do play Day of Defeat and I know that if you set the RATE too high in the console you'll use more bandwidth than you should).

Unless you've tweaked your WC3 settings I can't see why you're having a problem unless you have a very low bandwidth connection to start with. For instance if you're using 128MB/s ISDN then you'll pretty much eat up all the available bandwidth playing your game. If you have a DSL or cable connection over 1Mb/s then there should be plenty of leftover bandwidth.

Maybe you ISP just isn't giving you all the bandwidth you're paying for? Use this bandwidth tester: http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

It's also possible that the router is not working properly. You could try resetting it (check the manual - there's a reset switch on the back somewhere). Also wouldn't hurt to update the firmware to the latest version.

Hope this helps...

 

[Vcize]

Originally posted by: FlyingPenguin
Let me see if I understand. When you play WC3 on your computer (which is connected to the router via CAT5) no one else can browse the Internet, but you can play your game right?

Well...close. When I play WC3 on my computer for a minute or so (connected to the router via CAT5 as you said), the entire network crashes, including the game I'm playing. So no, I cannot play the game, and no one else can browse the internet. Note that all of the computers hooked up wirelessly actually lose the connection to the network, IE it says "no wireless network can be found." After I get disconnected from the game, if I don't try to reconnect for a minute or so, everything magically works again. All the computers hooked up wirelessly find the wireless network again, and my computer can browse the internet and whatnot again. But as soon as I head back into the game online, everything goes down again.

 

[Severian]

I've got a Netgear WGR614 wireless router, and had the same issues you're having. The router was essentially hanging, and usually required a reboot to get the wireless network up again. I tried updating the firmware to the latest version, which was specifically supposed to fix this issue, but no joy.

In the end, I configured the wireless router as just a wireless access point, and put my wired router back online, so that if the wireless went down the whole wired network wasn't taken down with it.

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Yes. I misunderstood. The game is flooding the router. Update the firmware. If that doesn't work I'd RMA the router (or exchange it if it's under 30 days). No reason that should happen to a properly working router.

I've had issues with Netgear. Linksys seems to be an all around game-friendlier router.