Ubuntu 10.04 with Fios

I have ubuntu 10.04 installed on my Thinkpad T60 laptop (which I received from my school 4 years ago). I have recently encountered a problem with it. While trying to stream videos from youtube or collegehumor (I'd assume other sites as well), I lose my connection to my router. It only seems to happen while streaming video, and will reconnect if i turn off and back on my wireless card. This problem will repeat with both chromium and firefox browsers. I have not tried others, but I's assume the same. I feel that this is an issue with ubuntu and the router/modem I received through Verizon Fios, since I had no problems while I had roadrunner at school with a Linksys WRT54g router. If anyone has any suggestions or a solution I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank You

We'll need a bit of info to help you diagnose this:

1. What wireless card does your machine run? I am guessing probably an Intel 3945ABG since the T60 was roughly that vintage. If you can post an lspci output that would be great.

2. Does NetworkManager pop up any dialogs or does anything show up in dmesg or /var/log/messages when this happens?

3. What happens when you connect your machine to the router with an Ethernet cable and try to stream video?

If the wireless card just seems to conk out, I had seen that behavior with the Intel 3945ABG wireless card in my laptop as well, although it was a specific driver/FW revision that caused the problem and it got fixed a while back for me (I run Gentoo, which is a rolling release and continuously gets updated.) I had to rmmod and modprobe the iwl3945 module and then it would work again.

It seems that quite a few people are having issues with FIOS and Ubuntu, but it's difficult to separate those issues into general unfamiliarity with Linux wireless and actual issues like what you seem to be experiencing. I would suggest trying to see if there is any useful information in the modem/router's logs after the issue manifests itself (you may need to enable logging) or sniffing the wireless communication from your laptop to see if there is any unusual traffic going on around the failure.

Also, if the modem provides a wireless router and you can disable that feature and use a traditional wireless router, you may want to consider trying this if you have a spare wireless router you can use for troubleshooting.