Game Consoles & NAT (Network Address Translation)
What is NAT?
NAT is an acronym for Network Address Translation. At any given time, there are thousands of devices on the university network accessing the Internet. The process of translating from multiple on-campus addresses to shared public addresses is called NAT. This is the same thing a home router does (on a smaller scale) to allow multiple devices to connect to a single home Internet connection.
Can the NAT type be made more open?
Our NAT type cannot be changed. Game consoles are designed for use in a home environment where it would be the only host of its kind. A more open NAT type depends on all incoming traffic on that connection to be sent to a single console. With the large number of consoles sharing the campus Internet connection, it is unfortunately not scalable.
Can you enable uPnP?
We cannot. UPnP is designed for consumer style home routers, and is not supported by our infrastructure.
University Official Statement
The UNC Asheville Residential Network is a secure broadband environment provided to support student life and academics. The residential network is contiguous with the rest of the University network and shares the same internet connections, bandwidth, and security features that support faculty, staff, and administration. Our network design is highly complex and differs significantly in capabilities and security from what one might have experience on a standard home network. Among these design differences is the use of advanced networking techniques to enhance security and prevent network-based attacks against your personal equipment.
An unfortunate side effect of this enhanced security is that some features of some gaming consoles cannot function on our network. These console features assume that they are the only device of that type on the network and that certain network protocols are available to support them. Neither of those assumptions is true on the UNC Asheville Residential Network where there are several hundred gaming consoles of various types and insecure protocols such as UPnP are not supported.
At this time we regret that there is not a feasible solution which allows these gaming console features to function while retaining the security and stability of the residential network for all users. We will continue to monitor this situation and research options which might make this possible in the future.