The Xbox 360 proved I can’t get rid of my Ethernet cables yet

• The Xbox 360 doesn’t like newer formats
• Keep an Ethernet cable around

I dug out my old Xbox 360 and decided to give it a go just to see how it still runs. Unsurprisingly, it was very slow at first, maybe because I hadn’t used it in years, but once it got past the initial loading, it was smooth sailing. With an Xbox Series X and backwards compatibility, I don’t have many reasons to use my 360 anymore, but it’s still fun to mess around with old hardware every now and then.

As it turns out, the Xbox 360 is a lot older than I thought. I upgraded to AT&T Fiber for my internet, and that replaced my old router with one directly from AT&T. I thought nothing of it, and everything worked as expected for everything I used. What I didn’t realize was that it automatically merged my 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz networks into one band. For most things, that wasn’t an issue, but apparently, it’s a problem for my Xbox 360.

The Xbox 360 doesn’t like newer formats

There’s one easy fix

I found out the hard way that the Xbox 360 can’t connect to 5Ghz Wi-Fi connections, so I needed to find out how to get my 2.4Ghz band back. Luckily, it was easy to track down the steps to do this, and I was able to split the connections in about 10 minutes of troubleshooting. However, there’s a much easier thing to do, and it’s just plugging in an Ethernet cable.

A lot of people already use Ethernet cables for their consoles, but I can’t imagine many people are still rocking an Xbox 360 two decades after its release. If you’re like me, you just get it out for special occasions, and you’re surprised by how extra steps there are now to take for you to get it online. I decided to just grab the Ethernet cable plugged into my Roku Ultra and run it to my Xbox 360 to speed up the process. It worked just fine, and it didn’t matter that I didn’t have a 2.4Ghz connection on my Wi-Fi.

I didn’t want to have to rely on an Ethernet cable for a connection for long, however, as my Xbox 360 won’t always be set up in an area that’s accessible by a cable, so I went through the process of creating the second band. It was very simple, and now my 360 is connected without issues. This doesn’t mean I’ll stuff my Ethernet cable back into the closet, because I see now that it’s important to have one handy when you need it.

Keep an Ethernet cable around

It can be very helpful

I’ve been largely ditching Ethernet cables when I can, but I can’t deny that it was nice to have one available in this case. I didn’t know problems like the one I ran into with my Xbox 360 even existed, so I imagine a lot of older hardware will run into issues like this over time. An Ethernet cable is a good shortcut around this, and it’s great to have a few extras lying around. Over the years, I’ve amassed quite a few extra cables, so I’m glad I never tossed them out. In an increasingly wireless world, the cable still reigns supreme in some ways.

As Wi-Fi continues to become more advanced, it seems like our older hardware will no longer be able to keep up. Fortunately, if the Ethernet cable continues to be a workaround, it’ll always have a reason to exist. In this scenario, with my Xbox 360, it’s not even about having fast speeds or stability, two common reasons to plug in a cable.

Now that I have my two Wi-Fi bands separated, I won’t have to use my Ethernet cable with the 360 anymore, so that’s one problem solved at least. However, downloading a game on my Xbox 360 over Wi-Fi certainly isn’t fast by any means, so I’ll keep the cable handy in case I need to redownload a game I bought previously.