How to connect to the Wii Shop Channel

Monday, November 27, 2006 » gaming

The Shop Channel has been the only negative aspect of my Wii experience over the last week (besides not being able to find another nunchuk). Usually when I try to load it up, it would get to the "connecting..." screen and just hang, often for five minutes or more. Since you can't hit the home button to return to the menu, I'd usually just pull the plug at that point, which was very painful for me to do to a brand new console. Even when I was able to connect, it'd wait at the same screen for about a minute. I figured Nintendo's servers were just overloaded, as I seemed to have more luck connecting late at night.

However, I just read on Digg that people have better success when they switch their router's wireless channel from 6 (The default in most cases, I guess? Mine was on 6.) to either 1 or 11. I'm not sure if it matters if it's 1 or 11 specifically, or just a channel besides 6, but I switched mine over and now the shop loads in 20 seconds from clicking the "start" button.

I downloaded today's Virtual Console game, Super Star Soldier, to celebrate. (Also because I am really impulsive.)

If it makes any difference, I'm using a Linksys WRT54G v4 router.