Belkin F5D7050 v4000 - Working, but Inconsistent

[jjwc]

My laptop, an XPS M1330, has an Intel 4965ABGN card in it, so I bought a Belkin F5D7050 (v4000) from NewEgg. After installing the Zydas driver (on 10.5.4 iAtkos), the device started working; it's able to detect and connect to my network just fine. To clarify, I'm on a school campus and the device detects multiple access points with the same SSID name.

 

Now, here's the problem: when doing multiple scans of surrounding networks, I noticed that the link quality can change dramatically--by as much as 30%--without having moved the device. When I connect to any AP, however, I get extremely poor bandwidth. Where I was averaging over 15mbps down and up on my Linux installation, I am lucky to get 1mbps on this one. The bandwidth jumps around rapidly; sometimes, I get 200kbps or lower and sometimes I get 1.2mbps. Obviously, this makes gaming (which, incidentally, if not ironically, OS X seems to be best suited for on this machine) virtually impossible.

 

After searching on the forum, I have found other instances of this problem, but the original poster usually edited their own post, saying that the problem resolved itself. I suspect that there are instability issues here, but it could just be that I'm doing something wrong. If anyone has any suggestions, I would greatly appreciate them.

 

Thanks.