After my return from Africa, I finally got my new Blackberry that I had been waiting for, the Bold 9650. On vacation, I was able to connect use a wifi connection to connect to my BES Express server with no problem at all. Back at home though, it looked like I was able to connect to wifi, but not to the BESx box, that’s on the same internal network.

Initially, I was thinking it was an issue with the wifi connection being used to connect to BES. I tried adding the wifi profile through the policy on my BESx. On further inspection, I realized the device was not actually connected to my wifi network. The wifi diagnostics said it was connected, and it received an IP from my DHCP server. I couldn’t ping anything though. From researching on the web, I found that there might be some issues with using WPA1 personal (with a pre-shared key). I use AES instead of TKIP. It’s a best practice, and its more secure than TKIP. Unfortunately, it appears that the Blackberry doesn’t work properly with this specific combination - WPA1 personal with AES. After switching from AES to TKIP my BB connects with no problem. BES/BIS over wifi works perfectly.

I haven’t tried any other combinations. At my new apartment I’m going to be setting up a new wireless router with dd-wrt. It will support WPA2, so I’ll see how that works.