Experiencing very slow browsing at times (atheros wireless)

[Petr Janda]

Sepherosa Ziehau wrote:
Please turn off the two sysctls as Matt said during your next round
testing.  Thanks.
Best Regards,
sephe
Turning them off didn't fix it.

I have switched to 802.11b:

ath0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
       inet 192.168.1.50 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
       inet6 fe80::20f:b5ff:fefa:9196%ath0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
       ether 00:0f:b5:fa:91:96
       media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect (DS/5.5Mbps)
       status: associated
       ssid homenetwork channel 11 bssid 00:19:db:0a:39:e6
       authmode OPEN privacy OFF txpowmax 37 bmiss 7 protmode CTS burst
       bintval 100
Sometimes it goes to 11Mbps, but usually stays at 5.5. Guess what, 
browsing has been much better now. Even though slowness occured a couple 
of times in the last 16 hours on 802.11b, it hasnt actually halted 
completly once.

What does it indicate?