They can have the best-selling and the most affordable console. They can have the best joystick/remote in the industry. They can have the best interactive games. They can have their Mario and Zelda, and Metroid. They can sell their games from 2 decades ago at $5-10 a download. They can do all that, but they still don’t get the Internet. “They” are Nintendo. And yes, I checked the year today, just to double-check – we are indeed in the year 2009.
Here’s the situation – I have a Wii. I have 2 wireless routers at home – well, 1 router and one access point to be exact. The router is the D-Link DI-524 – yes, it’s crappy, and yes, it works most of the time. The access point is Cisco – not D-Link, not Linksys, not Netgear, the enterprise-grade Cisco 350 series access point.
As I said, the D-Link router works most of the time – i.e. it has 99.9% uptime. Once in a blue moon its routing gets messed up somehow and latency shoots through the roof and I have to reset the thing. But again, it works most of the time. The Cisco access point, on the other hand, has yet to fail in anything it does – the thing so far has had 100% uptime and has proven to be extremely reliable with very good coverage.
Here’s the situation #2: I have many wifi devices – I’ll try to list most of them – 4 or 5 laptops, Blackberry, G1 android phone, Playstation, Sharp Zaurus (although not recently used), and yes – as I mentioned – a Wii.
NONE of the listed devices, with the exception of the Wii, have any problems associating with either of my wifi networks. Most of the time, Wii cannot connect to any of the networks. I get error codes like 32007 and 32002 when trying to update, and I’ve seen some others that I didn’t bother to write down. Also, the Internet connection test succeeds only about 50% of the time. So, I search the web – find suggestions to set the wireless router channel to 1 or 11. I do as asked. I restart the router. ALL devices reconnect just fine – EXCEPT the Wii. I find another suggestion to change the router channel to 3, or 6, or something else. I do as it says – result is exactly the same.
There can only be one conclusion – the reason for these problems are not my wireless networks, or any kind of interference. If this was true some or all of my other devices would be having the same problem. The reason instead is the Wii – either its software or hardware is inadequate to connect to a wireless network.
Nintendo tried, however. They got Opera to make the browser, they got their online updates, online store, virtual console, online gameplay – oh they tried probably as “hard” as they could. But unfortunately for them and for too many of their customers (like me), they didn’t get it. They screwed up, they mailed it in. And now, I am whacking them with this post in a complete disappointment. Yes, it’s the year 2009, and no, a Nintendo console still can’t reliably connect to the network!
