Inconsistent throughput on my Home Network

I have a Linksys WRT350N router and I seem to be having problems with throughput speeds. I have 2 laptops (vista) in a wireless configuration, 1 wired server & 1 slingbox, which uses a wireless gateway to connect to the router.

My issue is as follows.
When I watch the slingbox on my home network (via one of the wireless laptops) I am having stuttering problems with the playback....This shouldn't be the case as the network is fast enough to handle the stream.

I can see the network speed on the slingplayer and its showing @1200 kbps, it fills the buffer up, then suddenly the buffer disappears and the picture momentarily freezes.

I opened up a network monitor, and sure enough I get a consistent speed of several hundred kbps, and then it just goes dead (0kbps) for a couple of seconds....This coincides with the buffer being used up and the picture freeze....Its almost like the router or wlan card stops transmitting or receiving momentarily.

Any ideas or suggestions on settings I could change on either the router or wifi card.

BTW, if I'm only a couple of feet away from the router, or if I use a wired connection to the router, this doesn't occur....When It does happen, I still have @ 66-80% signal strength.

It's almost as if it is doing a packet verification that takes just long enough to stall the stream

Any help would really be appreciated, as running down network problems is really tricky
Many Thanks

 

I would suspect its the 11n firmware. It is still very buggy. V2 is suppose to be better. Do you have any 2.4ghz cordless phones?. Also use netstumbler to scan your area, allow it to run for 10 min to detect all. If there is another wireless an the area. 11n Spec requires the router to drop out of MIMO mode to play well with other networks. So you may play with your routere settings and see if you can fix it to one mode.

Are your wireless cards the one that came with the Notebooks or are you using Linksys cards?

I also have heard the Vista seams to have problem with more than 3 wireless locations. The 4th just ran havic on the connection. Dropping back to 3 and it cleared up. I have not confirmed this, a user reported this problem.