Why won't my kindle connect to my Wi-Fi?

Here's a Kindle tip, the seeds of which were sewn by a friend that works at Tesco in their technology department. It seems that although the supermarket used to sell a lot of Kindles (the 'proper' ones with e-ink displays, not the silly tablet Kindles), they also get a lot of them returned. It seems people had trouble connecting Kindles to their Wi-Fi. Now of course with mobile connected Kindles this was less of a problem, but it was a real killer with Wi-Fi only devices. And it still seems to apply to some devices, so this tip remains relevant.

Search the Kindle help pages on Amazon and you won’t find the answer, strangely. But it’s really very simple (and very stupid). The Kindle was designed in the US, and so it only uses the US Wi-Fi channels 1 to 11. If your home or office wireless network is set to use channels 12 or 13 (or 14 if you’re being really naughty) your Kindle simply won’t see the network. This despite it being a UK supplied Kindle, with UK settings. The answer is to change the channel on your Wi-Fi router to be in the 1 to 11 range. It’s really not ideal, and frankly I’d class this as a bug. Somehow though, I doubt Amazon is either reading this, or cares.