The Tyranny Of 8002A548
A recent CAGCast once again brought up Wombat’s chief problem with online gaming on the PS3. It’s not the way friends lists and invitations don’t work the way they do on the 360, and it’s not the way the PS3 doesn’t offer voice chat across all titles the way Microsoft does on Xbox Live. It’s the way his PS3 constantly kicks him offline with a PlayStation Network error. Until recently I was definitely feeling Wombat’s pain.
I’d get the cryptic 8002A548 error and get thrown out of a game of Rainbow Six Vegas or Resistance without warning. It was very frustrating, and it didn’t take long for me to remember that I’d been having game connectivity issues for a very long time with my home network configuration as far back as when I’d play online with my PS2. After some tinkering and experimentation I came up with a configuration that seems to have kept me connected with no discernable problems (knock on wood) and even improved download speeds in the PlayStation Store. Here’s how I did it.
Before I dive in, I’d just like to offer up a tidbit to console fanboys of both stripes. I don’t have a 360, but our own James does, and he confirmed with me that even Xbox 360 owners can have connectivity issues with voice chat and game connectivity at times. He also was able to prove that it wasn’t Vegas that was causing the issue because his own experiences with it on his PS3 have been pretty much flawless.
Classified as a general disconnection error, 8002A548 shows up in more than a few posts on the Official PlayStation Forums with no posted solution. That said, some folks are running setups that beg for problems: WiFi connections to their home networks with medium to weak signals and configurations that can only get Type 3 NAT connectivity are examples. (You can see the NAT Type in your network settings.)
If you want a rock-solid connection with the best chance at trouble-free online play you need to connect your console by ethernet cable into your router. I used to have a hub between my router and my PS3 and recently invested in some equipment to get rid of that impediment. I upgraded that to a switch, but while that helped things and kicked my PlayStation Store downloads into high gear, it didn’t clear it up entirely. Only by removing the switch between it and the router did I get closer to clean connectivity. Closer, but no cigar.
Other posters on the PlayStation Forums in general have laid the blame at the feet of the router. James reminded me that the routers are frequently the culprit in these situations, noting one friend who had big problems with voice chat and game connectivity on his Xbox 360 because of his router. However, one can’t discount the possibility of cabling problems anywhere from the broadband provider’s line entering your home up to the very tip of the ethernet jack connected to the console. And then there are the configuration tweaks being suggested in the forums. These suggestions run the gambit from turning on UPNP, turning off UPNP, turning off media server browsing in the XMB, and not using voice chat at all. The most offered solution is putting the PS3 in the DMZ, but that isn’t a panacea either if responses are any indication.
In the infrastructure department, I noticed that my broadband modem service was having problems on occasion, with web pages occasionally not fully loading and other times not coming up at all on my PC. I did some testing in my basement and found the connection to be pretty much rock-solid if I connected the cable modem directly to the incoming line instead of through a splitter. This was too far across the basement from my router, so I contacted the cable company and they let me know that if I brought in a copy of my bill and other ID to a local repair and service center they would give me a free splitter specially chosen to work with their digital cable and internet service offerings. Once this splitter was installed, my internet service basically became unimpeded.
With my PS3 finally connected to the router directly, I began to see some improvement, but I was still occasionally getting thrown out of games online. I was getting NAT Type 2 (which is the best you can get when not jacked directly into the cable coming from your broadband provider), and my bandwidth on Optimum Online is among the fastest the entire United States has to offer (and its price reflects how highly Cablevision regards itself). Shouldn’t this be enough?
I first tried disabling media browsing, which didn’t make much sense to me. If I’m playing a game the media browsing feature shouldn’t even run at all, but then again some of the forum threads were designed to help people trying to do voice chats in the XMB itself. Disabling media browsing didn’t help.
Next I tried UPNP. I turned it on on the router, and turned it on on the PS3, and started playing. To date, this has done the trick for my configuration. Knock on wood, and I know I’m sorely tempting fate by even posting this, I haven’t been thrown out of a game as far as I can remember for non-obvious reasons. Obvious reasons would include a power outage.
With luck, if you’re seeing problems with your PS3 online games, or even your Xbox 360 online games, maybe one of these steps can give you a hand and let you escape the tyranny of being disconnected from your online games.
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