Mighty_Dino

He alo changed the DNS. Instead of using his ISP's (when nothing's there, that's what it does), he changed it for Google's DNS. (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4)

I forget that google has their own, thanks for clearing up the mystery dns!

His solution can solve some people's problem, like it did mine, though yeah, if you don't have much local traffic, just reboot everything. .

My WiiU was stealing my laptop's IP address, though I'm not sure why. Could be the router, but I've had it much longer than the WiiU and never had that issue.
Now it and the laptop are set to static and I'm no longer having the hang ups and random connection drops (which were happening to everything on my network).
Best guess I have: the WiiU has a problem sometimes with obtaining an ip from a router and can inadvertantly configure itself to an ip already in use, causing packets to drop and general networking brouhaha.

He changed the channel (from 192.168.0.10 to 192.168.0.11) to one with less traffic, so he got a larger share of bandwidth.

You're not too far off, and because you're so close, I'll explain what he's done. Lucky you!

First, channel isn't the term to use, though it is used when discussing wifi, only it's referring to the channel used by the wifi antenna. More later...

What he did was tell his wiiU to used a 'static IP address,' which is what the 192.168..... etc. numbers are. The IP address would normally come from the router on its own, but that seems to be failing. Setting a 'static' IP address sure the wiiU is using 1 address only, the one you manually input.

DNS means 'domain name server' and its an IP address to a server somewhere that takes the 'domain name' or a .com type web address, and finds the the IP address of whatever server has the content you're looking for. Setting them to 8.8.8.8 etc is essentially setting your DNS servers to a Static IP address (or 2).

Things you'll need to know about this configuration:

** the prefix (the first three numbers separated by periods, in his case: 192.168.0) can change to something else if you replace your router, in which case you'll need to go through the steps again using a pc (or just another network device) to find the new prefix.
** if you go through the steps and find things are still slow, check your settings and try a new IP address. Use the same three number prefix, but a different fourth. It doesn't have to be 10 more, it could be 100 more, so long as its 254 or less and no other device on your network is using it.
** if all this and you STILL have issues, you actually COULD change the channel of your wifi router. Wifi broadcasts in the same realm of the electromagnetic spectrum as the wavelength of portable phones, wireless controlllers and, I suspect, the wiiU gamepad. You'll need to go into your router's settings, usually using a pc web browser, and change the channel it broadcasts on. It will be something like 1 to 11 or so. How you do it depends on your router's manufacturer, so you'll need to look up how based on that.

If this all made you heads spin, my bad!