Whenever I do anything much more demanding then web browsing over my internet connection (via a router), the latency goes from around 20ms to over a thousand. This makes streaming video and gaming a bit painful. If I plug my computer directly into the cable modem everything is rock solid.
I have a desktop wired into the router plus a laptop and cellphone that connect wirelessly (secured with WPA), so it's not an industrial weight LAN. I'm not doing filesharing or anything else in the background when this happens.
Thinking the router was bad (a Linksys WRT54GS2), I bought the cheapest D-Link at the nearest store (a DIR-615). Everything was fine for a week or two, then the problem returned.
I'm not really sure where to go from here. Anything else I should be checking? Or are cheap routers so pitiful that they can't be expected to reliably handle a 480p Hulu movie?