A Wii User’s Experience With WiiConnect

Brian Dipert of EDN.com has posted an article about his recent experience on Nintendo Wii’s WiiConnect24 feature.

He mentioned that he is using a Belkin F5D7130 router in 802.11b+g ‘mixed’ mode and he set-up his Wii 5 feet away from his router.

He is using channel 6 on the router and he says that he tried a lot of wireless gear on his router and they all worked fine. However, when he tried to update his Wii system to the latest firmware release, the download speed is very low even though he was using a high-speed connection.

Last March, he made some comments about the Wii and he remembered it when he was trying to find a solution for his problem.

He switched the access point of his router to channel 1 without making additional changes and voila, the WiiConnect24 worked as expected. It only took a few seconds for the update to complete.

In his article, he quoted a paragraph from Nintendo’s support page and this is what it says:

If there are other wireless devices in the area, they can interfere with the signal so much that the Wii console will not be able to connect to the router. Changing the wireless channel on your router may help. Most wireless routers have a channel range of 1 through 11. The best channels to try are usually 1, and 11, as they do not overlap with other channels. Typically, the channel settings for your router will be found in the router’s main “Wireless” tab.

I did not know about this issue and I am glad I found this article so I can refer to it just in case I use my router. Right now, I’m using a USB Wi-Fi Connection.