In the last three month I was experiencing that my internet connection started to get very slow and websites had long time to load. The first thing I made was an ping to www.google.com which showed that I was loosing pakets. Here some of the results:

64 bytes from 74.125.39.103: icmp_seq=2909 ttl=53 time=48.222 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2910
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2911
64 bytes from 74.125.39.103: icmp_seq=2912 ttl=53 time=44.372 ms

Days later I had to reset my router because it wasn't able to establish a correct network connection. It was after the reset when things worked again for some days. But later the same network timeouts started to happen again.

I would like to know how I can analyze the problem to get to the source which is causing this timeouts. Which steps do you take to circle in this Problem?

My Network
Laptop -> Wireless Router modem -> ISP

EDIT: I am on a Mac OS X 10.6