Roku not joining Actiontec PK5000 (my fix)

I tried like crazy to find a solu­tion to this prob­lem and since I had to put in the time, I fig­ured I’d save some­one else hope­fully. I’ve got a first gen Roku Net­flix box on firmware 3.1 (the most cur­rent ver­sion as of this post). Recently mov­ing and get­ting the Action­tec modem I started to notice prob­lems with the Roku join­ing the net­work. For exam­ple, if I unplugged the Roku from the power source, and plugged it back in, then I wouldn’t be able to join my wire­less net­work again. My Roku could see all avail­able net­works, and join some of them, but just not the one that the Action­tec PK5000 was creating.

I tried sev­eral options to get the Roku to be able to join, but what finally was the cul­prit was not secu­rity set­tings, wire­less chan­nel, ssid, pass­words, or the type of encryp­tion. What ended up allow­ing me to get back on the net­work was chang­ing the set­tings on the Action­tec PK5000 to broad­cast as wirel­less B or G instead of the set­ting that I had, which was G only. The way I fig­ured this out was by first set­ting it up to broad­cast as a wire­less B only net­work, and voila … the Roku joined imme­di­ately. Mov­ing it back to G only caused the Roku to not con­nect again, and then the B and/or G set­ting finally got me the results I wanted.

In my expe­ri­ence the only other way to get the Roku to join my net­work was by reset­ting the Roku firmware to fac­tory defaults and rein­stalling all my chan­nels, set­tings, and what­nots. For any­one who’s been through the process, you know what a pain and waste of time that can be, because the next time you lose power, you’re back to square 1.

For peo­ple who might need a lit­tle help find­ing the set­ting to change, here’s a quick tutorial:

step 1: go to your routers con­fig page (open a browser and go to 192.168.0.1 — should be the default) try click­ing this if you’re a bit lazy http://192.168.0.1

step 2: click on the grey but­ton that says “wire­less setup”

 step 3: click on the side­bar link to “radio setup”

step 4: under option 3 “select mode” choose 802.11b or 802.11g from the drop down menu

step 5: click “apply”

That should be it! Your modem will update with the new set­tings and once that’s done, your Roku should be able to join your network.

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