Snippet #851

So my wireless connection is proving to be particularly flakey of late. I'm seeing as much as 40% packet loss just pinging the router, with round trip times fluctuating wildly between a few milliseconds and over a minute. My router (a D-Link N 300 a.k.a. DIR-615 E3) is cheap (cost less than $50) but I am not sure whether the quality is a problem. I tried replacing the standard firmware with an open source alternative, OpenWrt, without success. So now, plugged directly into the cable modem via ethernet cable and doing my best to thrash the hell out of the connection and establish that the router and/or the wi-fi is at fault. Unfortunately, even if that turns out to be the case I still won't know if the fault lies on the Mac OS X Lion side, or the D-Link side (I suspect the latter, seeing as the usual turning AirPort on and off tricks make no difference to performance).