I had the same problem. It turns out that Network manager is a little overzealous in switching between access points (AP's) when more than one are present. You have two options
Use iwlist to find out how many AP's are there:
root@debian:/home/nofrills# iwlist wlan0 scan
Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 00:1E:58:A1:41:87
ESSID:"iiserk_wireless"
Mode:Managed
Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
Quality:4/5 Signal level:-64 dBm Noise level:-92 dBm
IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1
Group Cipher : TKIP
Pairwise Ciphers (2) : TKIP CCMP
Authentication Suites (1) : 802.1x
Preauthentication Supported
Encryption key:on
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s
12 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s
48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
Cell 02 - Address: 00:1E:58:A1:54:7B
ESSID:"iiserk_wireless"
#More such details
Then note the Address of the cell with the highest Quality. That is the AP nearest to you. Then click on Network manager applet, select "Edit Connections" and go to the wifi network listed. There will be a text box titled "BSSID". Paste the Cell address there.
Otherwise, you can ditch network manager altogether and use wpa_supplicant (Network manager uses it under the hood anyway). Just create a configuration file and edit your /etc/network/interfaces this way:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
pre-up wpa_supplicant -B -Dwext -i wlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
post-down killall -q wpa_supplicant
Option 1 is not very useful unless you spend most of your time at workplace in roughly the same location. Option 2 is what I am using now, and it works pretty well. But wifi does not get automatically reconnected after suspend/resume, so you need to run /etc/init.d/networking/restart
manually.
If you like doing things neatly, as an alternative to the generic killall
command, you can use the WPA specific tool wpa_client
:
wpa_cli -i wlan0 terminate