Wednesday, September 09, 2009

How to solve a wifi issue between Nokia 5530 and a Thomson TG787 router

So, my wife bought a Nokia 5530 Xpress Music phone and was very eager to try it, especially the Wifi since she could now connect to Facebook and e-mail at home without having to use my Mac or iPod Touch :-)

However, the experience was not that thrilling since the phone was unable to connect to our our home router (a Thomson TG787 provided by our ADSL provider).

After trying several different configurations (with WEP, WPA, WPA2, without encryption, etc...) and with other gadgets (iPod Touch and Nokia N80 could connect successfully to every configuration) I was very frustrated that I couldn't find a working solution.

At that point I went out and while at a shopping mall I was able to try some public wireless networks and it worked immediately. This increased my frustration to an even more absurd level. Back home, the problem remained.

It was only when, while using some Google-fu, I was able to find this forum post (in Portuguese) that I could finally solve the problem. Even though this post refers to the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music, the solution appears to be suitable for the 5530 model as well.

So, basically all you need to do is some Terminal action:

  • Open Terminal (on a Mac) or a command window (in Windows)
  • Run the following command: telnet 192.168.1.254
  • This will give you access to the router, but you have to insert the username (Administrator) and password (the password you defined)
  • Once an administration console appears, write: wireless qos config mode=disabled
  • Then hit Enter
  • After that (it takes a few seconds to compute) write: saveall
  • Then hit Enter
  • Just exit and you're done
The Nokia 5530 phone was able to connect to the home wireless network... success, finally!

Final note: I don't know exactly if this affects only this type of phones, but my Nokia N80 worked fine without the need to do this hack. Also, I don't know exactly what this hack does to your router so beware. So far, I haven't noticed anything different on all other devices, so I won't reverse it. By the way, if you need to restart your router, this configuration is lost, so you'll need to do it again.

1 comment:

Thierry Vanden Broucke said...

Just a tip:

When seeking the mac address from the phone ( using the code *#62209526#), it wont give you the correct mac address.
Let the device register itself and get the mac from the router.