Asking for advice peeps, so listen up
At home I have a netgear wireless router installed so SWMBO and I can connect to the internet when ever we fancy in th house and garden etc.
There has been an interesting problem. When I have connected to steam using my laptop (only when the wife is away and I cant be arsed to go up stairs to use the desktop ) and launch counter strike initailly all goes well until I try and connect to a server. Then the latency goes from ~30 to 1000+ and I was wondering what could be causing this?
When I can connect to a server all is fine with very little lag etc.

My laptop(Acer 6930G) has an intel pro 5100 agn wireless card and its connecting to a netgear WGR614.

Any ideas what could be causing this problem?

I'm not familiar with steam, servers etc etc but it sounds like you are connecting to a service (most likely hosted in america), and then connecting to a gaming server through it?

That is always going to add latency, and if the server is far away (and it is having to do a lot of work with the data you are sending) then it doesn't sound unusual?