HttpURLConnection when fetching stalls for no reason

Question

On rare occasions my fetcher class stalls for no reason? the only solution i can think of is to put it in a seperate Thread and check the time it started to download and the compare it with the current time - if over 5 minutes difference close the Thread down,
any other solutions or suggestions?
little bit of code here that handles the actual fetching of the webpage
                               g.log("fetching>"+u);
          String html = "";
          URL url;
          HttpURLConnection conn; // connection to the web page
          BufferedReader rd; // Used to read the web page
          String line; // individual line of the html
          try {
                url = new URL(u.toLowerCase());
                conn = (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
                conn.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (my-user-agent-name-here) Honour: robots.txt, Delayed");
                //conn.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0");
                conn.setRequestMethod("GET");
                rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
               while ((line = rd.readLine()) != null) {
                    html+="\n"+line;
               rd.close();
               html = html.trim();
          } catch (Exception e) {
               //e.printStackTrace();
               g.log("Exception>"+e+"\nproblem fetching>"+u);
               return "";
          g.log("fetched>"+u+"["+html.length()+"bytes]");
          return html;

Answer 1

you could be suffering from _*wireless interference*_.
perhaps one of your neighbor's wireless networks is interfering with yours. download iStumbler (free) or AirRadar (it has a trial period) and note the channels other networks in your area are broadcasting on. *change the channel(s) of your network as far away as possible from those*.