Facing difficulties playing games or carrying out another online activity while accessing the network of your Nighthawk router? If yes, then there is a possibility that the in-built firewall of your WiFi router is blocking access to them. All you have to do is, enable the Netgear Nighthawk Port Forwarding feature on the router and witness the magic. But, what does this feature mean, how it will be beneficial for you and what is the process to enable it? We’ll discuss everything here.

What is Port Forwarding Netgear Nighthawk?

When the in-built firewall of the WiFi router blocks certain applications and programs, the Port Forwarding feature comes to the rescue. It allows the user to gain access to those programs by opening a specific port on the router and hence got the name Netgear Nighthawk Port Forwarding. The benefit of enabling this feature is that you won’t witness lags while playing online games and a majority of your online tasks will get completed without any hassle.

Moving forward with the guide, let’s shed light on the basic requirements that you must fulfill before embarking on a new journey with your router i.e. enabling the Port Forwarding feature.

Basic Requirement: Netgear Nighthawk Port Forwarding

Before getting started, we suggest you collect some data about your WiFi router’s network. In addition, register the IP address of the server device on your router by accessing the Netgear Router Login IP. Doing so is necessary to successfully configure Port Forwarding as the dynamic IP keeps on changing its value which fluctuates the internet connection thereby causing problems. Following are the steps explaining how to reserve an IP address on a wireless router:

• Visit routerlogin.net on a computer accessing your Nighthawk router.
• As soon as the login window displays, enter the required info and click Log In.
• The BASIC Home page or the router’s dashboard will show up.
• Select the Setup option followed by Advanced.
• Navigate to the LAN page by clicking the LAN Setup option.
• Locate the Address Reservation section, and click Add.
• Enter the IP address 192.168.1.1 that you want to assign to your server device [laptop or computer].
• The previous entry needs to be done in the IP Address field using the router’s subnet like 192.168.1.x.
• Enter the MAC address value of the server device and save the changes.

In this way, you can reserve an IP address on your wireless router and make it ready to get the Netgear Nighthawk Port Forwarding feature enabled. The next section highlights the instructions to enable the feature very clearly.

How to Enable Port Forwarding Netgear Nighthawk?

• Decide the type of service, application, or game for which you want to enable port forwarding.
• Log in to your Netgear router using the IP address.
• As soon as the dashboard appears, select Advanced.
• Move to the Advanced Setup option and click it.
• Click Port Forwarding.
• You need to leave the Port Forwarding radio button to the chosen service type.
• Find the Service Name menu and select the Service Name.
• In case, you can’t see the desired service name, consider creating a custom service.
• Now, enter the IP address of the server device [computer] into the Server IP Address field.
• Click Add.
• The service will be displayed in the menu and you’re all done!

In this manner, you can enable the Netgear Nighthawk Port Forwarding feature on your WiFi router via the Netgear router default IP. Know that if you chose to create more than one Port Forwarding rule, every inbound packet will be checked against the rule following a sequence from second to top until the packet having the same characteristics is found

Sum Up

Enabling the Port Forwarding feature on the WiFi router is a great initiative to take your gaming or other online service experience to a whole new level. The reason being, it opens the port for those applications, services, or programs that get blocked due to the router’s inbuilt firewall. However, your server device must be assigned a reserved IP address on the router before all that. Since we tried to provide you with every little detail regarding the process of enabling the Netgear Nighthawk Port Forwarding feature on the router, it is expected that you’ll get successful.

On the off chance you don’t, you can contact our online support team at any hour of the day to get answers to any questions related to Port Forwarding Netgear Nighthawk router.