In this paper, we investigate spurious TCP timeouts in 802.11 wireless networks. Though timeouts can be a problem for uploads from an 802.11 network, these timeouts are not spurious but are caused by a bottleneck at the access point. Once this bottleneck is removed, we find that spurious timeouts are rare, even in the face of large changes in numbers of active stations or PHY rate. Authorized licensed use limited to: The Library NUI Maynooth. Downloaded on July 7, 2009 at 12:16 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.