Remember WEP wireless password on Nokia e61i (any e-Series)

I use the Nokia e61i as my mobile. Instead of my telco's data plan (which offers me a mea­gre 1GB per month) I sim­ply pre­fer to use my home wire­less LAN when I am at home. Until recently I used the wire­less "access point" with­out any secure set­tings, but have had to move to WEP now due to cheeky neighbors.

Prob­lem: Nokia's WLAN option kept prompt­ing me for the WEP key *every­time* I would con­nect to my email or any website.

After googling for a good many days and bum­bling around on Nokia's forums, I have finally fig­ured out how to make Nokia remem­ber the cotton-picking pass­word. Sim­ple answer: you need to lose your cached WLAN entry, which may be stored as a non-WEP access point.

Here are the more detailed steps:

1. Delete your cur­rent WLAN access point you've cre­ated for the E61i. This is the secret sauce.
2. Now, under

   Tools > Settings > Connection > Access Points

   Select Options and cre­ate a new access point using "default set­tings". We'll tweak them below.

3. Under Con­nec­tion Name, pick a name for your con­nec­tion. This doesn't have to be your wire­less network's SSID, but you can keep it under the same name.
4. Under Data Bearer, select WLAN.
5. Under WLAN Net­work Name, select man­ual entry and type in your SSID name.
6. Under Net­work Sta­tus mark "Hidden".
7. Net­work Mode will be the default: "Infrastructure".
8. Under WLAN Secu­rity Mode, choose your secu­rity type. For instance, mine is WEP, so that's what I selected.
9. Under WLAN Secu­rity Set­tings, go to WEP key set­tings and define your encryp­tion level, for­mat, and key. For instance, for WEP you might have 64 bit, ASCII, and "xyz­abc" as your level, for­mat, and key respec­tively. If you don't know this stuff, this entire tuto­r­ial is per­haps not for you, oth­er­wise you know what these val­ues are. (You can always login as admin user into your wire­less router and recon­firm these set­tings for your spe­cific case.)

That's it. You can now con­nect to some web­site or your email server on your mobile phone, select the WLAN with the name you chose in Step 3 above, and your Nokia e-series phone will remem­ber your WEP pass­word for good. Finally.