Connecting a Sony PSP to WiFi
Yesterday we gave son Matt a Sony PSP for Christmas (although he had made a contribution towards its purchase himself because when combined with a couple of games and a few other small gifts it exceeded our budget). The neat little device pleased its new owner and worked well. During the afternoon we attempted to connect it to the WLAN in our house but repeatedly got a ‘connection error’. Matt wasn’t too bothered about this but I viewed it as a technical challenge and unsociably spent an hour of Christmas Day on the computer trying to resolve it. I did so in the end, but not before trawling through numerous PSP forums where the youthful participants leave posts littered with spelling mistakes and profanities. Where are all the dads like myself trying to solve these technical problems in a methodical way? I got there in the end and am posting this in case it helps someone else.
Our home wireless network is possibly slightly unusual in that the thick walls and several small rooms require two wireless access points. So we have a Linksys WAG54G ADSL Gateway that connects to our broadband and acts as network router, but the wireless access point on this box is unused. Instead, connected to it with a patch cable is a Linksys WAP54G that acts as a wireless access point, and at the other end of the house is a second WAP54G that links wirelessly to the first and acts as a wireless repeater.
I try to run a secure network here so that our traffic cannot be eavesdropped from outside the house and so that passers-by cannot use our precious internet bandwidth (which is limited because our remote rural location means we can only achieve a 512Mb ADSL connection). Therefore the network is configured only to permit connections from devices with MAC addresses that have been entered into the permitted list in the router. It also uses WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), a protocol that supposedly replicates the security of a wired network by encrypting the traffic.
My first job was to find the MAC address of the PSP. The MAC (Media Access Control) address is a unique identifier for each networked device and it is hard-wired into the device so it cannot be changed. The MAC address of the PSP is available by going to the System Settings menu and then choosing System Information. It is a 12-digit hexadecimal number, with each two digits separated with a colon (e.g. 00:02:C6:9B:28:41). I added this to the list of permitted wireless MAC addresses in my router.
Then, because my network uses the WEP security mode, when working through the network connection wizard on the PSP I had to enter the WEP key. This is not the Passphrase in the router; below it are four keys (WEP Key 1, WEP Key 2, WEP Key 3, WEP Key 4). I am using 64-bit encryption on my WLAN so these keys are 10-digit hexadecimal numbers. (I suspect that if I had opted for a more secure 128-bit encryption the keys would be 26-digits long). My router is set to use key 1 as the default key so I entered the 10-digit hexadecimal number for WEP Key 1 into the PSP. These steps should be sufficient for the device to connect and it’s certainly all I did last week to connect a laptop from work to my network.
Sadly the PSP still showed a connection error. It could detect the network, display its name and show the signal strength (100%) but it wouldn’t connect. Eventually I tracked the problem down to the Wireless Network Mode dropdown list on the Basic Wireless Settings page of the router configuration. I had this set to 802.11g on all three Linksys boxes. When I changed it to Mixed (presumably meaning it uses both 802.11g and the slower 802.11b IEEE interface) the PSP instantly connected and I was able to use the built-in web browser to surf the web. By this time Matt had fallen asleep!