[cadrass]

I have a 15" PowerMac G4 HD with an iSight connected and am trying to video chat with a variety of other Macs... another 15" PowerMac G4 1.67, a 15" MacBook Pro, a 17" iMac Intel, and a 20" iMac G5. My Mac and my friend's Macs are all connected to the Internet via broadband connections... some cable modems, some DSL, and one on an AT&T T1. Sometimes it works and other times it does not... It is sporadic enough to call it unreliable. We all have enough horsepower and bandwidth but for some reason the chats fail to start and we are treated with "so-and-so failed to respond"

It is ancient history now but when we all had Panther, iChat 2 and G4s this never occurred... we started having problems when we all upgraded to Tiger and started getting G5s and CoreDuos... Not a very scientific observation and I'm not sure of the relevance.

I have been looking all over the place for a good answer but all I get are very obvious rudimentary troubleshooting ideas that I already tried. Hopefully some one here was able to solve this (as I am coming to discover) widespread problem.

Thanks

[sirnick4]

This same issue happens to me as well.. I think it could be an issue of what routers you or your friends are using.

Check here for compatiblity.

PS: Welcome to Applenova

[cadrass]

That is a good link. I have a Linksys WRT54G which is not on the list but is one of the most popular, best selling, wireless routers on the market. My friends have a variety of other routers, none of which are on that very short list. As I have indicated conferencing worked fine in Panther but has become a problem since upgrading to Tiger.

During troubleshooting we have placed our machines in the DMZ and have connected our Macs directly into the broadband access devices. With the exact same results.

Our ISPs only give us 1 public IP address, usually through DHCP, so port forwarding will effectively only work with one computer and is less than a desireable solution.

I believe the problem to be in either Tiger or iChat 3 and not in the router or firewall. There seem to be a great deal of users with the exact same problem of sporatic iChat trouble. And the answers seem to be... keep trying and it'll work at some point... or wait til tomorrow and try it again... Apple seems to be in denial of the existance of the problem and no one on the outside has been able to arive at a solid solution. If it was a networking issue the solution would be very clear and simple.

PS. Thank you for the welcome... I have been snooping around for some time now looking at the rumors and such waiting until I had something to say prior to joining up. I look forward to contributing to the community.