Stories • August 13, 2026

How ITS is testing the gaming
experience on the NAU networks

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We’re working to better understand and optimize how our users experience media on our networks.

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This month, in a collaboration between the ITS Service Desk and Network Operations Center, members of our ITS community gathered for a department-wide gaming event to monitor how our university firewall handles matchmaking for popular online games.

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What we’re looking for with these kinds of tests

Enterprise firewalls use a process called Network Address Translation, or NAT, which allows multiple devices to share a single internet connection. This is similar to how a typical home router connects multiple devices to the internet. However, with large-scale enterprise firewalls, NAT is optimized for stability at scale, and not the one-on-one connections that some online games require. This distinction can create issues with how some online games handle features like matchmaking.

To get online games working closer to the experience on your home network, we applied a technical workaround on our networks that addresses this issue. With this workaround in place, the goal of our gaming event was to monitor the effectiveness across a variety of popular games.

During our testing, we didn’t run into any issues with our solution, and our testers’ internet connectivity and speeds remained stable. However, this kind of small-scale test won’t produce the same results as when campus is at full load. Because of this, our network teams plan to continue testing and monitoring throughout the semester as more students connect to the network and our workaround runs at scale.

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This isn’t a challenge unique to NAU

Many other universities and institutions with large-scale networking infrastructure struggle with this same issue, and their solutions vary. Some opt not to support this kind of feature. For ITS, we’re committed to finding ways to make it work for our gaming community.

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Contacts

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