In the right situation, it can be pretty dang quick and easy to get a Wii online using its built-in wifi.  You choose a connection, search for an access point, and away you go; the catch is that many libraries have wifi setups that are not quite the right situation for the Wii's default settings.

If you have any sort of a wireless password that you give out to patrons who use your wireless, there's a place to enter that in the Wii wireless settings; you can enter a WEP or WPA password.  

The Wii can store 3 different wireless configurations.  Configurations include a wireless network name and the password if needed.  This is great if you take your Wii to different networks, so long as you don't take it more than 3 places...

When you set up a wireless connection, you can search for or enter an access point and the password if needed,  The Wii will then do a connection test; this includes getting an IP address from your router and trying to make a connection to Nintendo's servers.

This is where the most common problem in getting a Wii online occurs; many wifi authentication processes involve a trip to a web page to enter credentials like a library card, or even just click 'ok' on some terms of service.  Even if you're able to connect your wii to a wifi access point, your wii may not be allowed to reach the internet (and nintendo's servers) unless you visit your library's registration page.  Sometimes, this is (relatively) easy if you can buy the Internet channel from the Wii shop; you can connect to the network, then open the internet channel and fill out the wifi registration form.

Now, this isn't usually a problem if you've connected successfully to the selected connection before; but if you need to do a registration for your wireless it can be quite tricky to get it online the first time!  It's a catch 22; the new connection won't complete because it can't get through to the Nintendo mothership, but you can't get access to the internet until you use the connection that won't complete to connect to the wifi registration page.

So, there are a few ways to deal with this.  Depending on your organization, asking IT may be a great idea or it may be a horrible idea, or you may be as close to IT as your organization has.  Regardless, if there's someone geekier than you who has administrator access to your wireless system, they may be able to just register your Wii manually behind the scenes and you'll be good to go.  To do that, your geek will need what he calls the MAC address of your Wii.  This is a standard unique identifier for every network device that's built in to the hardware.  In the wii settings, this is called the system id.

An alternate approach would be to ask IT to set up an open access point for the purpose of your tournament.  They probably won't do it, but it may not hurt to ask and it can cut through a lot of problems very quickly.

One approach they may be much more comfortable with (but that requires new hardware) is to use wired ethernet to connect your Wii to the network, instead of wireless.  For this, you need a Wii USB-ethernet adapter (see more information [[http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems/wii/en_na/onlineWiredTS.jsp|here]] that will then plug into an ethernet cable.  This will still need some configuration, but it's much more secure than an open access point.

If you have IT and you need to talk to them about this, depending on how much they know about gaming (usually a lot, but sometimes almost nothing) they may freak right out by the prospect of attaching a Wii to their precious network.  Just tell them that the Wii cannot be infected by a virus and has very low bandwidth requirements, and is far less dangerous to their network than the diseased laptops the patrons bring in every day.

Still having trouble?  Contact us at gtsystem at aadl.org and we may be able to help.