Well, I continue to be disappointed with the Wi-Fi on the 770. It works fine at home -- no problems connecting with WPA2 and AES encryption, decent download speeds. I've also had success with it at a large bar/restaurant that offers free Wi-Fi to customers. But in areas where there's a lot of Wi-Fi coverage, meaning lots of different networks present at the same time, it's totally useless.

A typical case will be that it sees the network, but when you go to actually connect, the "W" icon blinks for a while and then eventually says you're connected, but Connection Manager returns a bogus IP address. DHCP fails and you can't actually use the connection for anything.

In practice, this means the 770 is useless for me as an Internet device whenever I'm at places like:

• Conferences and conventions
• Hotels
• My work, on the 5th floor of an office building

So basically, if I have anything work-related to do -- meaning cases where it really might be nice to bring the 770 along instead of lugging around a laptop -- I now know it well enough to just leave it at home.

Am I alone in this?

It works fine for me. At the local mall, there is free wifi from the mall and the Apple store. There are also another 10 or so signals from the various establishments. I can lock on just fine to the mall signal or the Apple signal.

At work, we pwd protected access for guests. I can log onto that as well.

Is it possible you are locking on to networks that don't actually allow outside access? My 770 typically finds a lot of unlocked networks, but only a very few of them actually allow outside access.

Any connection that shows up with a lock symbol I know I can't connect to (except my own) but yes, sometimes I see them without a lock and a good, strong signals and then I see the behaviour you mention. As rr0123 says I assumed they are just networks that don't allow outside access. Others without locks I can connect to fine like the one someone rather handily has near my bus stop in the mornings

I know locally there are some connections that look open but you have to go to a special web page to enter a code before you can use it (at least I think that's how it works).

My home town has heavy wifi coverage (lots of students). I typically see 3-8 wifi networks no matter where I am. Of those networks that appear to be open with no encryption, I can usually attach to about 1/3 of them.

I wish we had a tool to show us more information about the connections. I find that most two-bar connections fail. I’d like to know if the connection failed because of MAC filtering, weak signal, too many errors, or some other reason. A blinking W doesn’t do me much good.

I also think that the 770 is very sensitive to wifi signals. It seems to pick up a lot of networks that are too far away to reliably attach to. I see a lot of 0, 1, and 2-bar connections that I can’t attach to. If I do attach, I get an IP address of 0.0.0.0.

Many times I’ll search for networks, find a few, re-search for the networks and some or all of them disappear from the list.

dude, the reason why you are always getting that is because those connections are not wifi infrastructure connections, they are ad-hoc network connections. windows will accept ad-hoc connections on the last infrastructure connection that was made. This is why you see all those network connections that don't work. The bogus ip address is given by autoconfiguration. See this link: http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/99jul/I-D/draft-ietf-dhc-ipv4-autoconfig-04.txt

I was wondering about those weird wifi connections that didn't work.

Ad-hoc and infrastructure APs can be distinguished by the colour of the blue "W" icon in the connection dialogue box.

Ad-hoc APs are a much lighter blue than an infrastructure AP.

If you've played Doom on the 770, it'll have created an ad-hoc network called 'musgo' - this'll allow you to see the blue for comparison.

HTH,

Andrew

Just a clarification: it is possible to go online over ad-hoc, but the host computer must be connected and have the "share internet connection" box checked in settings.

Also, at least one commercially availible wifi here in Shanghai appears to be open, but you cannot use it without paying for it. Still connects though, just like described. I've noticed that all connections that actually work will go from 'connecting' to 'connected' within a few seconds, the others take quite a bit of time.

Some of those connections that are open are not actually attached to the internet on the other side. They are just connections that people connect to, to gain access to the network.

So that's where this mysterious musgo network that always shows up first on searching but never works comes from.