I had this problem with my home WiFi. In my case it was due to the type of encryption my router was set for (and which I had to modify).
My smartphone etc has no problem with WPA2 etc, but my poor old laptop will only accept WEP which is of course not very secure, and certainly not recommended. Unfortunately, I cannot update my laptop hardware to accept the newer protocols. I don't want to change it because, other than that it works just great!