[calumma]

I appreciate the advice but I remain unconvinced. What I don't understand is if my airport connection is unreliable, why does the sync succeed when the phone is placed in airport mode and wifi is then manually reselected. If the wifi was being overloaded, presumably it would be overloaded whether or not the phone was placed in airplane mode? Surely the wifi network would be more likely to become overloaded if I force the phone to keep its wifi connection after turning on airplane mode?

Also, this problem occurs no matter how much or little information I am attempting to sync. Are you honestly saying that syncing just one item can overload a users wifi network? Note that I can copy large files and control other macs on the same network using Finders built in VNC client (that presumably push much more data back and forth), as well as macs at remote locations.