Today, and thanks to the UPnP protocol, it is no longer so necessary to have to open ports on our routers manually as we used to.However, there are still exceptions such as some applications or games that we have no choice but to open the ports manually, since they do not have this built-in functionality, and they are not able to “tell” the router that they need to be accessible through a port. external.Today we will explain how to open ports (port forwarding) on ​​any router.It is not the first time that, especially console video game players, they complain that they have a bad NAT, or that they have connection problems because of the ports, however, there are also cases such as more advanced users who need to open ports to your FTP server, SSH, VPN server, video surveillance application, remote access or any reason you can think of.These types of problems are not solved with the UPnP service that all routers normally have activated by default, and which, for security reasons, it is recommended to deactivate it since it is possible that our IP camera without us knowing it, opens a port and they can access remotely.In these cases, the solution is to open the ports manually.For this reason, it is often necessary to open the TCP and UDP ports of the router and thus avoid certain problems.The objective is to make a specific program work correctly, such as an application to download, an online game that has to connect to servers, etc.Always with caution, making sure that we are opening the correct ports, we can do it in a simple way as we are going to explain.The first thing you should do if we want to open the ports is find out the access data of our router.Currently almost all new routers have a sticker under it where they indicate: management IP address, username and access password.If in your case you do not have this data, we advise you to look for a user manual to access it correctly, since we are sure that you will find this information.Normally the access credentials are «admin/admin», «1234/1234» or similar, to get the IP address of your router, you must open a cmd console in Windows by simply putting «cmd» or Symbol in the Windows search engine. system and press enter.Once we are in the console, we simply have to put “ipconfig” and we will get something like this:The IP of the default gateway is the one that you will have to put directly in the web browser.Once the access data is found, it is as simple as accessing the management IP address via a web browser, normally it is usually 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1, it will depend on each router how it is configured.Of course, our advice is to always change the password to access the router, since it is as important as the Wi-Fi key itself.This will help us avoid security issues.Depending on the manufacturer of the router, in the firmware we can find the menu as “NAT”, “Virtual Server” and also as “Port Forwarding”.We must find this option by navigating through the different menus of our router, normally it will be found in the advanced options section, or simply in the “open ports” section.NAT is a technology that allows us to go out to the Internet with multiple devices through the same public IP address.With Network Address Translation, the router will take care of translating the internal private IP addresses into the external public IP address, and vice versa, so that we can have communication without problems.If we want to communicate from inside the NAT (from the private IP addresses) with the Internet, we can do it without having to open any port, since the NAT takes care of it.It is only necessary to open ports in the event that we have to make a communication from the Internet (from outside the NAT) to the inside, for example, to access an FTP server, FTPES, SSH server, OpenVPN server or any other service to which we want to provide connectivity.In these cases, we will have to open a port in the NAT to let the data packets pass to their destination (a PC or server service).Once inside the port configuration menu, we will normally find either a blank box or a "+" key, and it will be as simple as entering the appropriate data in the following fields.We have used an ASUS router where the graphical user interface is very intuitive.Once this is done, all that remains is to apply the changes and we will have the configuration made for the ports entered.One clarification, if we want to open different non-consecutive ports we will have to use the syntax explained by ASUS at the bottom.Some routers let you perform often and others you have to apply the change on each port entered.Now we are going to show you how to open the ports in another router, specifically in the ZTE F680 that was previously marketed by Jazztel and also by Masmóvil:As you have seen, the configuration menus are similar between the different routers, although in some cases it allows us a greater or lesser range of possibilities in the configuration.Once we have configured the port, we apply changes and check access from the outside (Inernet).We also want to recommend that, once you have configured the configuration to your liking, it is advisable to make a backup of the router configuration, since if you do a RESET or your operator updates the router, it is very possible that it will return it to factory settings.With this backup you can restore it later so you don't have to manually configure the ports again.There are multiple tools on the Internet to perform port scanners, and to verify that we have actually opened the port correctly on our router, it is highly recommended to use this type of port scanner to verify the configuration.