As you may have read earlier today, Nintendo has announced a brand new Wi-Fi router in Japan, to arrive at retail September 18th for 5800 yen (about $54 USD). As far as we can tell, the general internet reaction has been “Why did Nintendo think we needed another wireless router?”
Thanks to three years of Japanese study and the liberal use of an online Kanji dictionary, GameCyte now has the answer: One-touch, simultaneous WPA and WEP security for Wii and DS. If that still sounds like Japanese to you, then hit the jump for a little background and my sorry attempt at a layman’s explanation.
In August of last year, Nintendo silently updated U.S. Wii consoles to unlock a piece of latent functionality already available on the Nintendo DS handheld — support for Buffalo Technology’s AirStation OneTouch Secure System, or AOSS. By itself, the update meant little; but in combination with a Buffalo AOSS-enabled router, users of these and other AOSS devices would be able to press a single button (well, two, one on the router and one on the device) to create a secure internet connection without entering passwords or mucking around with network settings.
Nintendo enabled AOSS on the Wii expressly because one such Buffalo device was on its way to U.S. shores: the $50 Wi-Fi Gamers Access Point. When the device arrived in November, IGN sang its praises.
However, short of importation few Wii or DS owners ever got to try AOSS. In June, Buffalo was permanently enjoined from selling any 802.11 wireless gear in the United States, and when an appeal later in the year failed, that gear — including the Wi-Fi Gamers Access Point, and by some accounts Nintendo’s own Buffalo-built Wi-Fi USB Connector — disappeared from store shelves.
Though IGN mostly called out the device’s ability to secure wireless connections for DS and Wii (and PSP, and PS3) in a lockdown corporate environment, AOSS had another use which some gamers are still clamoring for: the ability to connect a Nintendo DS (which is limited to the unsecure WEP encryption protocol) in a household that uses secure WPA encryption. It did so in a less-than-optimal manner, forcing the entire connection down to the lowest-common-denominator WEP security for the duration of use, but there you have it.
The device that Nintendo of Japan has announced today improves upon AOSS with a new feature they’re calling “multisecurity.”
When connected to the Nintendo Wi-Fi Network Adapter using AOSS, Nintendo says that multisecurity allows both DS and Wii to run simultaneously using different encryption schemes. The DS will connect using a WEP key while the Nintendo Wii (and, should the access point support, other wireless devices) retains secure WPA encryption. How secure the overall network is at that point is hard to guess — weakest link and all that — but it probably beats the pants off of pure WEP.
Oh, and before you get turned off by the above diagram, a DS connection doesn’t require any new, special game card — it’s just referring to the fact that the DS cannot use the Wi-Fi connection at all without at least one Wi-Fi enabled game.
As of this afternoon, Nintendo representatives could not confirm or deny whether there were any plans for the device stateside; but seeing as the Wi-Fi USB Adapter has been discontinued and screenshots of the new device don’t show any obvious Buffalo branding, we wonder if bringing this new Wireless Adapter to the U.S. might not have been Nintendo’s plan all along.
And hey, if you do have to import, setup should be a breeze…
Update, 10/16: Things are now looking up for Buffalo’s US Wi-Fi plans.
September 9th, 2008 at 12:01 am
Any technical details on how exactly that will work? The only solution I can think of is two separate wireless networks, one WEP and the other WPA, running from the same router.