There's a few things going on here. From what I can tell, the technology in use is VDSL - a technology that uses the old copper telephone lines. Your speeds seem to be a little lower than the typical ones provided here, and your pings somewhat higher: https://www.whistleout.com/Internet/Providers/CenturyLink/VDSL/Internet-40Mbps-2 VDSL has a relatively high overhead on latency. Any substandard wiring in your home (or multiple telephone extensions) will reduce your quality significantly. On a 100Mbps plan using similar technology, with a rewiring removing the old internal wiring and only providing a single point, I saw an improvement from about 55Mbps to achieving its maximum 100Mbps capacity. So, you might have an internal wiring issue (old/degraded wiring, poor termination, multiple phone line points). Consider a rewire. I highly recommend you always use Wired Ethernet for anything that is latency-sensitive. Any plan with greater speeds (especially for uploads) will give you a larger overhead to do things on your network. For example, if you have cloud syncing on your cell phone, and you take a bunch of photos/videos, as soon as you get home it'll start to sync those photos to the cloud. If you took a video, at 4Mbps upload capacity, it could take hours to sync it. During that time you'll have a pretty substandard experience unless you do some trickery and implement a weighted fair queueing mechanism on your router (not all routers have this). Even when I was on a 100/40Mbps plan, I would implement both WFQ and also traffic shaping (to about 38Mbps) to ensure my upload channel was never saturated. I'm now on 1000/400Mbps so it can generally take anything I throw at it. Alternatively, if you are able to use a different technology (Fiber is best, but cable can be better for latency and upload capacity). I'm not a fan of wireless connections as they are a) contention based (limited frequency range, lots of people wanting to use it) and b) also not that great for latency. That being said, I once implemented a 20 mile point-to-point wireless link with a relay point in the middle at my brother-in-law's farm so he could get decent Internet from the nearest town and that latency wasn't bad (an additional 10ms versus being in town). This might help you to find some alternatives in your area: https://www.whistleout.com/Internet/cable-verification-one-spn Also ask your neighbors which ISP they use too and if they're friendly, ask if you can run a speed test on their network to compare against yours. Also, fire up eSignal see how it compares. Please keep us informed as to any changes/improvements you try as this thread may be helpful to others with similar issues.
Lots of good info in there, thanks so much for your time and expertise. It appears as though CenturyLink is in the process of transferring over to Quantum Fiber, but that is not available in my area at the moment. You were correct, it sounds like they are in the process of upgrading old copper wiring etc. I will say that I did some of the things that spy recommended and they did help some, so I will repost them here: Try the simple and least expensive options first. A few of things off the top of my head... (I'm assuming you're using windows 10): disable fancy gfx disable unnecessary system services contact the software vendor and ask for help bump the software's priority look in task manager to monitor system resource utilization I went through and "cleaned everything up", then bumped the prioritization one notch to "above normal", and it has had at least a minor positive impact thus far.