random high ping responses

on a late 08/early 09 MBP, have some weird wireless issues going on ..

I cant figure this out, when pinging a remote host, whether internally or externally i see random high ping times. Now I dont think this is wireless interference as my imac does not exhibit this behaviour.

PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=3.971 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=4.840 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=4.121 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=4.088 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=4.069 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=3.790 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=6.434 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=5.330 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=6.120 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=4.127 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=4.294 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=4.340 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=74.265 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=13 ttl=64 time=162.622 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=14 ttl=64 time=95.917 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=15 ttl=64 time=22.189 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=16 ttl=64 time=260.620 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=17 ttl=64 time=188.266 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=18 ttl=64 time=3.210 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=19 ttl=64 time=4.688 ms

has anyone else witnessed this? could this be a hardware issue?