Amazon Kindle & Mixed Wi-Fi Security

Recently, my Father-in-law bought a Kindle for my Mother-in-law. He brought it home, read the instructions, and tried to get it it set-up to use his wireless network at home. He logged into his wireless router and got the security key, but when he entered it on the Kindle and tried to connect it would fail. He tried several times, even manually configuring the connection, but nothing seemed to work.

Wanting to determine if he had a defective unit (unlikely), he took it to a local McDonalds and tried connecting to the free Wi-Fi provided by AT&T… Success!

At this point, he called me to help him figure out what he was doing wrong since it seemed to work everywhere but home. I walked him through a few things over the phone before logging into his computer remotely and looking at the settings on the wireless router myself. The settings on his fairly new Belkin router were configured to use WPA/WPA2 for security. I had him try to manually set the Kindle to use first WPA2 and then WPA without success.

At this point, I changed the security settings on the router to be just WPA2 (not WPA/WPA2) and then had him try connecting the Kindle again… Bingo!

Apparently, the Kindle doesn’t like wireless routers that are set to use mixed mode Wi-Fi security settings. Since the only other device that he has to connect to his wireless network is his laptop, we can safely use the latest/strongest setting of WPA2 without worrying about older devices not being able to connect.

Hope this helps someone else out there!