Thank you for your response. I appreciate your reference to the Cisco models, and the information you provided regarding Linksys versus Cisco, and the specificity of the Linksys model we would look for. It is very helpful information.

I do have some confusion regarding this, however. The engineers at Linksys stated that we could not manage more than two XBoxes using one of their routers. They suggested that we move up to a Cisco router to handle more XBoxes. We have a situation where we could have up to and sometimes more than 4 XBoxes coming out of our house. Writing this I am thinking we should probably upgrade our online service altogether. :-) This is the situation we are dealing with at this time regarding router choice, though.

Hi and thanks for the nice rating,

The linksys engineers may have their reason to state what they said, to understand that please specify what do you mean with "manage" the xbox.

Do you mean network play in-house ?

online play on game servers ?

peer-to-peer online playing ?

In any case, I believe a linksys router would do it all, possibly with some additional configuration.

Sorry for the vague description.

We have a problem with having more than two XBoxes logged onto XBox Live at a time. Since our children have some very close gaming friends which get included with our "family" it means that we need to access XBox Live to include them in our games. So I guess the answer to that would be the last two options you listed, requiring online access. Newbie here, in case you hadn't figured that out. :D

Btw, we currently have the Linksys Wireless-G Broadband Router with SpeedBooster, Model #WRT54GS ver. 6, and it will not let even two XBoxes into XBox Live at the same time... We are looking for a new router, which is how this all came up in the first place. If you could provide specific Linksys router info, it would be greatly appreciated.

It sounds to me as though the issue is related to NAT. The most effective way to avoid NAT complications, in my opinion, is to increase the pool of external IP addresses that you receive from your ISP. Once there are more addresses available, the XBox connections would be coming from different IP addresses, and would essentially be independent of each other as far as the Internet is concerned, yet local to each other on your internal network. I'm not sure that any router or firewall would resolve the issue without more IP addresses available to you. However, with the additional addresses available, you may not need a different router (I'll defer to people more familiar with the Linksys' functionality for that).

George

Thank you for that information, George. You are right that our NAT is at the heart of the problem. The support/engineers at Linksys told us that the problem could be solved either by changing to a static IP through our provider (they don't offer that service), or acquiring a router which would be able to handle the multiple machines--specifically a Cisco rather than Linksys router. Rather than change our service, and pay more for that service, we opted to search out a new router which would handle the multiple machines.

Unfortunately, we are just civilians in this area, and the Cisco site is set up for professionals who know all the equipment and what is needed. I entered this forum to receive the advice of those of you who do know this information so very well. I appreciate your advice and the information you have provided.

I assume you are trying to login to the same XBox Live account ? Are you sure it's not due to XBox Live only allowing one simultaneous login per account ? I know for sure that MSN Messenger, at least, will only allow 1 active login per account, logging off any other active messenger sessions with the same account name.

No. We all have separate XBox Live accounts. We all have separate accounts and the conflict rests not in the accounts but in the number of XBoxes we are trying to run through our IP address. We are trying to find a router that will let us have more than two XBox 360's run through our IP without finding a provider that will charge more for a static IP.

Hi,

both George and the other fellow have given here tow sensible answers for the problem you have with multiple xboxes, in factI believe you can't be sure that a new router alone would solve them.

I am beginning to get that impression. I am learning from the comments. I appreciate everyone's advice and assistance. Thank you.

Try to find out for sure that game from multiple xboxes from the same IP is allowed - as you use two separate logins there should be nothing wrong with that, or if you learn, e.g. from gaming forums, that a special router setting needs to be done (port forward), it can be done on your linksys.