Last night, after attending the midnight Wii U launch event in New York City (which was a lot of fun!), I went home to download the big day-one firmware patch.
But. When I tried to connect the Internet, the Wii U told me it couldn't find my WiFi router. I played around with all the settings, entered my WiFi password roughly four thousand times just to make sure it was right, and spent about two hours trying not to take a hammer to my GamePad. Eventually I decided to head to sleep and see if someone else would find a solution.
Someone did. This afternoon, I googled around and eventually found this thread on the Nintendo tech support forums. Seems like other people have also run into issues connecting to their WiFi routers, and one helpful poster found the solution.
Here's forum user GAMEDEV:
Ok so far heres what works, entering in everything manually.
1. Go into connection types, Hit "Manual Configuration"
2. Input your SSID
3. Input the correct security type, this is key.
4. Put your password in properly
5. For ip address "Do not auto obtain".
6. open up cmd in your computer, type in ipconfig
7. Now input that ip address but add 10 to the last number so "192.168.0.1" will be entered as "192.168.0.11"
8. Enter the rest of your info inside such as subnet mask and default gateway exactly as you see it in your ipconfig.
9. Now hit next, hit configure now for your DNS. When asked about DNS hit "Dont auto obtain".
10. For the first server put in 8.8.8.8
11. For the second server put in 8.8.4.4
12. Hit Next, when asked about a proxy hit no proxy
13. Leave mtu as the default
14. it should work, if not check the ip and that it is the internet ip + 10. Good luck
Following his instructions worked perfectly. Now my Wii U is all Interneted up. So if you run into any WiFi issues, try this method out and it should help.