I've been hounding this issue off and on for over a year now and the biggest problem is the fact that it is so inconsistent. However, three symptoms as reliably as I can determine are:
a) network traffic will become choked off almost entirely. a couple hundred kilobytes every several seconds. Adium does not realize it's not connecting so the list stays active, messaging may continue but connection errors may be frequent. Pages will load extremely slowly or more often not at all.
network traffic is infrequent small spikes
b) after joining a wireless network and using it as normal for a period of sometimes up to 10 minutes download traffic will cease entirely. Upload traffic will continue at a healthy normal volume but the download graph will flatline. Adium disconnects and pages don't load. Other computers on the wireless network are unaffected.
c) Joining wireless network brings the whole thing to its knees. Usually not immediately sometimes it will take several minutes. All computers connected to the router will lose their connection. Upload traffic continues so the computer is not immediately aware that it's requests are not making it past the router. Pages continue to attempt to load and do not give the immediate error as when there is no network connection at all.
A notable circumstance:
After one of the above failures required restarting the wireless router the page xkcd.com will fail to load images and will, after a long struggle, only load the HTML of the site. All other sites tested loaded normally. A router restart followed by switching airport off then back on will allow xkcd.com to load properly.
In my apartment I used a D-Link router and in that case symptom "B" was the most common. I would lose my traffic but not my connection and the other computers remained unaffected (another PowerBook that occasionally used the network wirelessly never reported similar issues). Currently I am using a LinkSys WRT54G and the most common symptom is "C" but both other symptoms have occurred in the last 48 hours.
I have been trying to determine if there's an action I am performing that initiates the traffic loss but have been so far unsuccessful. Last night symptom "C" occurred at one point where I dozed off and I believe the only thing running was a ping I had started and the disconnect happened several minutes later.
At one point a firmware update to the LinkSys seemed to solve the issue for several hours but symptom "C" eventually occurred (the xkcd issue has, however, not happened since).
Issues like this arise on perhaps 30-40% of the new wireless networks I join and because I'm often traveling that's enough to be a serious frustration (not to mention the frustration of encountering a problem I can't solve). It's also enough to where I don't get complete data on all the networks I'm using which is impeding my search for a cause.
I would like to say this has never happened with an ethernet connection but I'm only about 90-95% sure that's true, ethernet issues may be unrelated. The machine is a 2004 12 inch 1.33 PowerBook (2nd gen) running 10.4.9 (which you'd have to pry from my cold dead fingers).
The post is long but I've tried to provide as much information as I can on an incredibly elusive issue. I know there's probably vital info I've left out but it's a start. If anyone has any ideas or needs more information to help me hammer this out I'm all ears. I'd love it if someone could help me solve this. I'll buy you a beer.
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