Wifi.

I’ve had the same old Linksys WRT54G router for years and it’s always been good to me. Recently I’ve noticed a bit of a problem though. I have several wireless devices, including several laptops, a Wii, and various wifi USB cards. They’ve all connected to the router fine. However, when my wife’s laptop is sending a lot of upload traffic over wireless (say, uploading pictures to Picasa or, now, doing a full backup to our local server), then my laptop drops off the network and can’t connect until her traffic is complete.

I have 4 current clients on the wireless network, and looking at my DHCP logs, my wife’s computer (broadcom b43) is uploading things just fine, and my mythtv box seems happy (zydas zd1211b), but both my laptop (atheros ath5k) and the wii (unknown) appear to be struggling to reconnect while her computer is generating soo much upload traffic. All computers run Ubuntu Hardy or Intrepid.

So, is it common for other computers to drop off the network if one wireless client is sending a lot of traffic? Why would I not have seen this before? I tried looking at the router’s QoS options but there really aren’t any for wireless devices. Options?