Ah, the intermittent 40 second wait problem. I remember it well, although I haven't seen it in a long time despite still being on the In Home cable network.

I started a Geekzone thread on this issue more than a year ago, here it is -  http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumId=44&topicId=105805

A brief recap of my observations from that topic:

A few addresses handled by Akamai, most notably static2.stuff.co.nz, would show the intermittent 40 second delay problem for me. They would normally resolve to an IP address in NZ and those fetches would complete very fast, much quicker than a second. But sometimes the data was coming from outside NZ, and in those cases almost every fetch time would fall into one of two time ranges: 0-2 seconds, or 39-41 seconds.

When it was happening I could often reproduce the 40 second delay outside a web browser with curl or wget, so it was not limited to my choice of browser. I was only using the recommended 203.97.78.43 and .44 DNS servers, and still am. I've never used any external DNS like 8.8.8.8.

About a week or two after I started that topic, the problem seemed to fade without any change in hardware or software configuration on my part. I have no idea why. It reappeared sporadically on rare occasions. Can't remember the last time I have seen it. Definitely rarer for me in 2013 than previous years.