Why is the Wii’s wireless so crap?

Now that my blog is up I have a virtual license to rant!

Now what shits me most about the Wii is it’s wireless networking. Why does it not like to work? I have used many wireless devices on my current router with no troubles, but the Wii only works about 1 in 20 times, and even then it only seems to work for a short amount of time.

I’ve tried all of Nintendo’s suggestions like moving the Wii, channel 1 or 11, static ip, mixed mode B+G etc. Nothing works.

Being the friend he is, Google pats me on the back and assures me that I am not alone in my struggles. Wireless networking is not a new technology, it really should not cause such issues, especially on a device that only provides wireless and no built in Ethernet port.

12 thoughts on “Why is the Wii’s wireless so crap?

  1. I have been using the Wii’s wireless capabilities for over a year with no problems.

    I have used Linksys, D-Link and SMC routers with no problems. I have even used the Wireless card in my MacBook Pro to give the Wii internet, again no problem.

    The only time I ever had problems is when another computer on the network is hogging the internet’s bandwidth, other than that no problems.

  2. You didn’t mention what troubleshooting you have done. A friend of mine had trouble getting his phone to work consistently on his wireless network until he upgraded his AP firmware. Could this be a similar issue?

  3. I had similar issues once in the past with my wii, I had to set the channel to 5 (no other worked) to get it working, this is especially odd as the wii was standing 2 metters from the wireless router, I guess whatever wlan chipset they use must be some cheap crap. (perhaps someone who knows more about this can reply) it took be about one hour to get it to work trying every single channel at a time :/

  4. never had any issues with my wii’s wireless, but every so often my 360 wireless interferes with all my wireless devices when it is in the off state. so if i remove the power cord from the 360, everything works again and i can replug the 360 back in, strange, but it is a reported problem.

  5. Yeah, I don’t know. It seems to hate my WPA2 network, although it’s more reliable on System Menu 4.0 (for no apparent reason?).

    BTW, email me, trying to get ahold of you. :)

  6. My router it won’t even work with wpa2 I had to back it down to wpa. Via information on Nintendo’s site.

  7. I’m having the same issue as you described. I’m not playing online anymore for that reason. I tried to troubleshoot it, but there are no configuration changes that helped. Perhaps, they are using code coming from ndiswrapper…

  8. I don’t generally have any problems with mine, excepting the times that the phone rings because it’s a 2.4GHz cordless phone. I did set it up using WEP instead of WPA2 for backward compatibility with a few of my older laptops though. Perhaps that’s the trick to getting it to work reliably.

    I’m using a Linksys WAP54G without any special settings. The SSID is being broadcast, but it is password protected. Perhaps the Wii isn’t real good with anything other than WEP?

  9. Hmmm… The only issue I’ve had with wireless on wii is it being unbearably slow, at least when logging onto shop channel. The ethernet cable addon did nothing to alliviate this, sadly x(
    Oh right, got a DGL-4300 and no wireless phones

  10. I solved the networking problems on my DS/(i) and my Wii by changing the WEP authentication mode from “Open” to “Shared” in my router.

    Why it works? I don’t have the most remote idea, but it does (at least for me).

    Please tell me how you fared with this little change :)

  11. Thanks for your input Freddy. My Wii is not set up atm, but when I set it up again if I still experience networking issues I’ll give that a try :)

  12. Just for info, after an hour trying every solution i found on the web, the only thing that worked was to put was to deactivate the DHCP client of the Wii and input a static ip address.

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