I bought an Actiontec GT701 DSL/Wireless router from Qwest (my DSL provider) a few months ago, and it has the latest Qwest-approved firmware. My line is 1.5Mb down, 9xx Kb up. I have my main PC hardwired to its single ethernet port and do wireless access from my laptop, using WPA. It's worked well enough 'til I did something unusual yesterday.
I was downloading a large binary file from a newsgroup using "Binary News Reaper" which optimizes the process by opening up multiple connections to the server to overlap the open/read/decode operations. It managed to keep my 1.5Mbps DSL line maxed out.
While this was going on, I fired up the laptop. The DSL line was pretty much saturated, so I didn't even try any Internet access.
Still, the wireless connection kept dropping, even though I was only 6 feet from the GT701 and had a very strong signal. As soon as the binary download finished, the wirless connection returned to normal.
Does the GT701 simply not have enough horsepower to keep these two balls in the air at once, or is mine likely broken?