As dumb as I feel for this, I had trouble finding a lot of information about this online so I thought I’d post here for anyone who is also having this kind of issue. If you don’t feel like listening to me ramble, just skip to the next paragraph. I recently discovered a problem with my wireless network. I had always had an issue with networking at my girlfriend’s place but I always blamed it on her AT&T DSL. I noticed the problem pretty big time last night because I had to do some work on my server so I needed an ssh connection. This was the slowest and most painful thing I’ve ever had to do, so I eventually just gave up and figured I’d try again at home on a better network. When I noticed the same problem here, I started looking everywhere on the network for what could be causing it. Could have been the router? A bad ethernet cable? After realizing everything else in this house works fine except for this macbook, I knew the problem existed on my end and was affraid for a moment that I might have to get her serviced. Let’s cut this story shorter..

Here’s the problem I was having. It was most noticeable when I pinged another host. a ping command would result in output like this…

dnites-macbook-pro:~ dnite$ ping dnite.org
PING dnite.org (208.75.84.151): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 208.75.84.151: icmp_seq=4 ttl=46 time=42.403 ms
64 bytes from 208.75.84.151: icmp_seq=5 ttl=46 time=41.906 ms
64 bytes from 208.75.84.151: icmp_seq=6 ttl=46 time=1830.279 ms
64 bytes from 208.75.84.151: icmp_seq=7 ttl=46 time=600.642 ms
64 bytes from 208.75.84.151: icmp_seq=8 ttl=46 time=56.242 ms
64 bytes from 208.75.84.151: icmp_seq=9 ttl=46 time=42.090 ms
64 bytes from 208.75.84.151: icmp_seq=10 ttl=46 time=49.821 ms
64 bytes from 208.75.84.151: icmp_seq=11 ttl=46 time=1204.137 ms
64 bytes from 208.75.84.151: icmp_seq=12 ttl=46 time=380.502 ms

As you can see, pings would be fine for a second, then they would spike at 1 or 2 seconds every few pings. If you are having a problem like this, check your dashboard for any widgets that might be scanning for nearby wireless signals. I was running one and removing it cleared up all my problems. If your having bigger problems than this, I’m sorry, I can’t help you. But I spent a few hours trying to figure out something so stupid, so I hope this helps save someone some time.