How to Enable Port Forwarding on Netgear Nighthawk Router?

Are you facing trouble in connecting your VoIP app or multiplayer online games to the Internet? Is your web browser loading fail despite being connected to your home WiFi network? Well, the problem may be a blocked port on your Netgear Nighthawk router. Worry not! It’s pretty simple to fix.

Your Nighthawk WiFi router bridges the gap between your smart devices and the Internet, ensuring that data packets are coming in and going out in a proper manner. A Nighthawk router acts as a wall that keeps away the harmful and unwanted traffic.

Router virtual ports are like doors that are reserved only for some useful online traffic and websites. Netgear Nighthawk routers always do a good job of automatically blocking the unwanted traffic to save your home network from the harmful attacks.

But in some cases, you need to make your WiFi router to open such ports for a particular program. This procedure is called port forwarding. In this blog, we will guide you on how to enable port forwarding on your Netgear Nighthawk WiFi router.

Assign Your Nighthawk Router a Static IP Address

Firstly, try to gather some information about your home network and change your Netgear WiFi router IP address from Dynamic to Static protocol. A static IP address is an unchanging number whereas the dynamic IP address keeps on changing after refreshing the network connection.

So, before getting started with the Netgear WiFi router setup for port forwarding, assign the static IP address to the device for which you are looking for an open port.

How to Check Network Configuration?

• Click on the Start button or press the Windows button, and then type CMD into the search field and hit Enter key.
• Type ipconfig command and press Enter key.
• Note down all the network details.
• To set a Static IP address on a Windows OS, press Windows key + R, and then type ‘Control Panel’ and hit enter.
• Click Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Center.
• On the left side, you will find the ‘Change adapter settings’ option. Click on it.
• Right-click on ‘Local Area Connection’ and then hit on ‘Properties’ option.
• Now, select ‘Internet Protocol Version (TCP/IP4), and hit on ‘Properties’ option.
• Select the ‘Use the following IP address’ radio button.
• Enter the IP address, Subnet Mask (S/M), Default Gateway (Router IP address), and DNS servers that you noted down before. Click the OK button.
• To assign a static IP address to a video game console or range extender on your network, you have to use the game console’s control panel or Netgear Nighthawk extender setup web-based interface.

Steps to Enable Port Forwarding on Nighthawk Router

Now you have assigned your computer a static IP address.On other network devices, log in to Nighthawk router and open a port.

Open any of your preferred web browsers. Type the default IP address of your Netgear Nighthawk router and hit Enter key.

• • Enter the Netgear router login credentials.
  • Once you are on the Netgear Nighthawk setup page, look for the port forwarding option.
  • Click on Applications & Gaming → Port Forwarding/Port Triggering → NAT/QoS.
  • Select the (TCP, UDP or both) protocol.
  • Enter the static IP address and click on the Enable button.

Congrats! You now know the process of port forwarding. We hope this simple and handy guide will help you open your router’s virtual ports with ease.