GTA IV Problem

"the connection to one or more players has been lost. Returning to single player"

If these words echo in your head since getting you hands on GTA IV then hopefully i have the answer to at least a few of you.

I have been receiving this error just before the lobby of multi player GTA or just as i entered an online game. I found a workaround which was to plug my PS3 straight into my cable modem. When this worked i realised that there was no problem with the game, no problem with the servers, no problem with my ISP - the problem lay squarely on my router.

After trying to make my PS3 a De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) - turning of the media server and opening up every port i could find was linked to GTA, i turned to the forums.

My rule i live by was proved right once more - if I'm having a problem, there will always be someone else who has had it and normally have already found the fix for it. I found the answer on the US PlayStation board.

http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=gta&thread.id=411207&view=by_date_ascending&page=2

But it still wasn't clear what my problem was as the firmware was up-to-date... or so i thought.

I am using a Netgear WGT624v3 router and in the option to update the firmware it goes off and checks and then reports back that it is on the most recent firmware - this is not the case.

The newest firmware can be found http://kbserver.netgear.com/release_notes/d102982.asp

Simply download it to your hard drive and then browse for it in the update firmware section and then upload it to the router. After this is complete i had to reboot the router a couple of times to get the Internet on my PC and the connection back on my PS3, but one i had done i was straight back into Multi player GTA - i held my breath and entered a Deathmatch and... Success!!

I really this helps others as i always seem to find the solution to my problems but having to search through pages and pages of forums is no fun.