[ale] Dropped Packets on Wifi

[brian at polibyte.com (Brian Pitts)]

Hi,

I threw up an old Linksys BEFW11S4 to have wireless when visiting my 
family for Thanksgiving, but the connection is unusable. Checking 
ifconfig or netstat show an incredible number of received but dropped 
packets. I experience packet loss > 50% when pinging the wireless router.

netstat -i
Kernel Interface table
Iface   MTU Met   RX-OK RX-ERR RX-DRP RX-OVR    TX-OK TX-ERR TX-DRP 
TX-OVR Flg
eth0   1500 0         0      0      0      0        0      0      0 
  0 BMU
eth1   1500 0       264      0   1531      0      599      0      0 
  0 BMRU
lo    16436 0         3      0      0      0        3      0      0 
  0 LRU

There are no other wireless access points nearby.

Can anyone tell me what this signifies and what may be causing it?

Thanks,
Brian