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Wireless Home Networking - Index of

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In This Chapter<br />

Chapter 11<br />

Gaming Over a <strong>Wireless</strong><br />

<strong>Home</strong> Network<br />

� Unwiring your gaming PCs: Hardware and networking requirements<br />

� Getting your gaming consoles online<br />

� Forwarding ports and configuring your router for gaming<br />

� Setting up a demilitarized zone (DMZ)<br />

In case you missed it, gaming is huge. We mean huge. The videogaming<br />

industry is, believe it or not, bigger than the entertainment industry<br />

generated by Hollywood. Billions <strong>of</strong> dollars per year are spent on PC game<br />

s<strong>of</strong>tware and hardware and on gaming consoles such as PlayStation and<br />

Xbox. You probably know a bit about gaming — we bet that you at least<br />

played Minesweeper on your PC or Pong on an Atari when you were a kid.<br />

What you may not know is that videogaming has moved online in a big way.<br />

For that, you need a network.<br />

All three <strong>of</strong> the big gaming console vendors — Sony (www.us.playstation.<br />

com), Micros<strong>of</strong>t (www.xbox.com), and Nintendo (www.gamecube.com) —<br />

have made it easy for you to connect your console to a broadband Internet<br />

connection (such as a cable or DSL) to play against people anywhere in the<br />

world. Online PC gaming has also become a huge phenomenon, with games<br />

such as EverQuest II attracting millions <strong>of</strong> users.<br />

A big challenge for anyone getting into online gaming is finding a way to get<br />

consoles and PCs in different parts <strong>of</strong> the house connected to your Internet<br />

connection. For example, if you have an Xbox 360, it’s probably in your living<br />

room or home theater, and we’re willing to bet that your cable or DSL modem<br />

is in the home <strong>of</strong>fice. Lots <strong>of</strong> folks string a CAT-5e/6 Ethernet cable down the<br />

hall and hook it into their game machine — a great approach if you don’t<br />

mind tripping over that cable at 2 a.m. when you let the dogs out.<br />

Enter your wireless home network, a much better approach to getting these<br />

gaming devices online.

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