I'd like to perform network tests on my game in the most realistic way possible. This means having to deal with players who are on crappy wireless connections, who might even be playing on cellphones.

Short of having a friend living in a far away country with a copy of the game and a cellphone testing platform, what's a good way to stress-test your networking gudgeons?

Are there virtual Ethernet adaptors that can be configured to drop a percentage of packets, corrupt them, delay them, send them out-of-order?

Maybe some sort of firmware that can be loaded onto an external router which would sit in between two testing machines?

And, is there any sort of standard for robustness that I should aim for, like supporting 300ms ping delays, 30% packet loss before things go wonky, dealing with timeouts, etc?

Hmm. Looks like I might be able to set up my spare netbook with Ubuntu and turn it into a router and run Netem on it.

Just go to the local Starbucks at prime time. Half of them still have decent performance but I find when there are 15+ people I often see packet loss spike from 0/1% to 5-15% and latency spike from 150 to 300-2000.

Consider setting up a Linux box as your network router, and use netem (successor to NistNET) to cause network disruption.

The other alternative, if you are writing your own network code, is to put a debug only path in that lets you cause artificial failure conditions, limit bandwidth, and so on.