iPhone Tutorial Videos

Today I tried my first FaceTime call and unfortunately it failed.

Why Facetime didn’t work at the office

This is because many corporate networks and firewalls only open up the ports that have been determined required for completing your daily work tasks.

Nowadays however (especially if you work in education or research) the term “daily work tasks” can be quite broad and generally require more flexible network procedures because for instance watching a video of Youtube video could actually be required for you to learn how to complete another task down the line.

The Apple Knowledge base aritcle rightfully states:

The Wi-Fi network administrator can refer to their router, firewall, or security software documentation for information on configuring port forwarding.

Using Facetime at home

The only problem however is that home users will generally nowadays also have a firewall configured on their Wifi Access points.

Luckily at home this isn’t really very difficult to do with the help of the useful website portforward.com which runs you through opening ports on a wide range of home routers. You can confirm that ports are indeed the problem by running their m Port Checker Tool but if you don’t want the Ask taskbar installed make sure you untick it during installation

Configure your Home router for FaceTime

You can visit the Port Forwarding guides specific to your home router and set it up using the ports below

The ports required for FaceTime is as follows:

ports update from Apple:

53
80 (normally open anyway for web)
443
4080
5223

udp
16399-16472

Configure Work Routers for Facetime

Providing this blog post to your IT department might save them some time and get your request attended to earlier