XBox Wireless does not like the Irish…..

So, here is an interesting one, that took me to the highest levels of Sonicwall support.    I should thank them as well, as Microsoft’s Xbox team blew this off as “not their problem” and refused to troubleshoot with us.   Sonicwall however, I kept the pressure on, and they got me to a great guy who worked for nearly a month with me on this issue.

What issue?

Well, essentially, the Xbox would not connect to Sonicpoint wireless access points.    It would look like it did, and it said connected on the Xbox screens, but no IP address would ever make it to the Xbox machine.   On top of that, the WPA would still know that the wrong or right password was entered on the Xbox, but still no connection to the wireless.   It was all very odd!

The solution….

This is a doozy.

Microsoft XBox does not recognise or accept 802.11 management frame if the country code in the information element is set to IE, or in fact some other countries!   At the same time, some major countries in the same regulatory domain such as British, Germany or France can still work!

The workaround for the moment is to set the Access Point to another country (in my case the UK).

Anyone from Xbox listening?

Yep….    the Xbox team don’t like the Irish it seems.    They need to fix this, and as of yet I have not found someone on the team that will accept a bug report.   Maybe this blogpost will bring it to someone’s attention 😉

 

  One Reply to “XBox Wireless does not like the Irish…..”

  1. Katy Pluta
    April 22, 2009 at 8:38 am

    Hi Nick!

    Why not contact Maj. Nelson? He may know where to forward this… Or ping me and I’ll get you in touch with Mike, the X-Box MVP guy 😉

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