I'm currently using the Gentoo dist. With or without binary drivers my connection stalls at times. This does not seem to be dist specific or hw specific. I've had the problem with two different computers. The problem appears with dhcpcd and static ip. My windows neighbors say's that they don't have the problem, although the connection is slow.

What could it be?

[edit] When it is stalled a temporary fix is
runscript /etc/init.d/net.eth0 stop; sleep 2; runscript /etc/init.d/net.eth0 start
this works to get the connection back and working a few seconds, minutes ...