I’m baffled: on my Sony PSP, when I try to connect to the network, it says that there are no access points detected. What shall I do?

I’m surprised by how often I see this question submitted or added as a comment on other Sony PSP discussions, actually. I think that the problem here is that a lot of Sony PSP owners aren’t necessarily the geeky computer contingent that the Sony marketing team believes us to be.

To a computer savvy person, you say “wireless network” and they instantly know that we’re talking about an 802.11 or “wi-fi” network and that they require both a physical network connection — a modem, cable model, DSL line, etc — and what’s called a “wireless base station” that communicates with all the wireless devices and relays their network requests onto the physical network connection.

In our offices, for example, we have…