Recently I was having some issues with my Xbox 360 getting kicked off of Xbox Live. I would notice that my notebook would also get kicked offline as well. Both of them are running wirelessly, but I would notice that my computers hardwired directly into the router wouldn’t get disconnected.

So this weekend I decided to investigate and attempt to solve the problem.

Here's how my network was configured

As you can see in the image above, my network was pretty ordinary. Cable modem (internet) connected to my Linksys WRT160N Wireless Router. From there, everything was connected. The Xbox 360 (through a D-Link DWL-G820), the Wii, all our desktop computers and both Crystal and my notebooks. The numbers on the image represent the number of computers that have access to the network (although not all of those get used with the same frequency).

I was having issues with my 360 kicking me offline randomly. That especially is bad in the middle of a fire fight on Call of Duty: World at War. I was browsing on the web and stumbled across this page. What he says there makes sense, and I had an old wireless router that actually had been replaced because of the same problem — it kicked me off the wireless network randomly. So I thought I would give it a shot.

This is what my network looks like now

Although I’ve only had it like that for one day, it’s been one day of not getting knocked offline. And that’s good. The only thing different that I did from what Mr. Ludington suggested was to flip the IPs. So my “Router A”, the Linksys WRT160N is actually at .254 and the Dell TrueMobile 2300 is at .1. The reason for that is because the TrueMobile won’t let me change the IP address from anything but .1 whereas the WRT160N (a much nicer router) will let me change it to whatever I want.

I had a little bit of issues getting the WPA code to enter on the Xbox. The problem was that the DWL-G820 recognized my wireless network as a WEP network. But it’s not, so I had to enter everything manually for my wireless network.

To do that, on your Xbox dashboard, go to My Xbox > System Settings > Network Settings > Configure Network and then click on the first option there for your wireless network. If you don’t see your Xbox in wireless mode, then chances are your wireless adapter isn’t hooked up right. Once you click on the Wireless Mode, go to Scan for Networks. You can cancel the scan right away if you don’t want to wait for your wireless adapter to look for networks (cancel by hitting X). You’ll see an option called Specify Unlisted Network. If you let your wireless adapter scan for networks, you may need to scroll to the bottom of the resulting available wireless networks to see it. Depends on how many neighbors you have with wireless. Once you’re in the Specify Unlisted Network screen, you can enter your network’s SSID and then you can choose WPA security and enter your wireless network’s keyphrase. And that’s all there is to it! Happy networking!