Macbook Pro Airport extreme cyclical lag spikes

Question

It seems that my Airport is dropping packets and generally lagging in a regular fashion:
I first noticed it while gaming on the macbook, everything was running fine, however every 15-20 seconds or so a massive lag spike would occur, bringing my ping from 100 to 1000ish, and the game was indicating a large amount of packet loss. I don't really use the MacBook to game and I've never had that problem while gaming with other machines on the same network, which leads me to believe it has something to do with the computer/airport.
To try this out a bit more, I had a go at uni today, and found the same problem using the uni's network. Seems to confirm that this has to do with problem on the computer side.
To get something easier to measure, I used the ping command on the MacBook and on a desktop on the same network.
Results:
MacBook and Desktop have the same latency (same network so normal) however every 15 pings or so on the Macbook there would be a big lag spike lasting usually for 4 pings, with the latency increasing by a factor of 10
ping also reported a packet loss of 2% on the Macbook compared to 0% on the desktop comp.
The desktop is MacPro also with an Airport extreme
There you have it
Seems to me that there is a problem with the airport card although the fact that the lag is cyclical is a bit weird, but the laptop has an extended warranty so I should be ok if any repairs need to be made
Anyone with any info feel free to share :P

Answer 1

Well I though the problem was gone, but it seems to have resurfaced... kinda.
I previously had an Airport Extreme base station and an Airport Express "brick" (both 802.11n) running in WDS. After unplugging the Express and disabling WDS, the problem seems to be gone (I've only seen one recurrence, and it could well have been the fault of the remote end of the transfer.)
So I think it might be a dodgy WDS implementation. I'm a little worried though, given that I saw what looked like a recurrence -- I have a sneaking suspicion that the problem is still there, lurking, waiting to sneak up and surprise me when I least expect it... Still, unless it becomes an issue again, I'll chalk it up to firmware quirks and keep my fingers crossed that it's not an issue with my wireless NIC.