Wednesday, December 19, 2007

iPod Touch WiFi Works on WEP Key Index #1 ONLY

My wife and I were visited by Santa early this year and brought us each an 8GB iPod Touch. I guess his elves got wind that I lost my PDA last month and that my wife, well, just wanted a new iPod.

Anyway, we got them out of their slick, black boxes and started working straight away to get them connected to our home wireless network. However, after many attempts to set and re-set the iPod's WiFi settings to connect to our network I had no success to show for it. Frustrated, I scoured the 'net for answers, finding various user forums and blogs with people describing a similar experience and some suggested fixes (reset router/iPod, disable WEP security on the wireless network, etc). These fixes generally provided mixed results among those who tried them, while none of these fixes got the iPod rocking on my WiFi.

On a whim, I tried changing the 'Default Transmit Key' setting on my Linksys router to '1' and the iPod WiFi connection finally sprung to life.

I was just a tiny bit disappointed that I had to modify my existing network security settings to accomodate the iPod connection, but I suppose changing the WEP key index is not a major issue. Hopefully Apple will provide the ability to specify the WEP Key Index in the iPod's WiFi settings in a future firmware update.