I've had people with ping times in the 300s load quickly, and people with less than 100ms ping times take minutes. Is that their ping to the server, or their ping to me? (And my ping is typically <100ms)
Pretty positive that is their pings to the server that you see.
Here's the thing - most home networking involves downloading. You rarely upload much, so if you look closely at the fine print, your ISP usually 'guarantees' a certain down/up and the up is usually much less than down. The up can range from decent to abysmal, but users usually don't care so long as the down is great. You can have a fantastic, low ping network connection but also have a tiny upload speed*. In fact, ISP's to some degree
want that - giving you a crappy up speed is one way to ensure their home users don't set up huge web sites or ftp servers and chewing up even more of their bandwidth. In the rare network situations where it involves you uploading a large quantity of data (as I'm theorizing here), however, you're going to be slow if this is the case for your connection.
Most of today's networks hand you a pretty solid upload speed now, but there are still a lot of older networks that severely restrict the up. My guess is those people that finish last at summoning are on such networks. There's quite a few complaints in the LoL forums where people with solid rigs are complaining about poor load times, and many of the support responses refer to typical network solutions like disabling AV shields and the like. Also noticed many complaints about poor speeds right after patches - which is exactly when the highest demand for patch d/l'ing would occur!
This is all just a guess and lots of anecdotal evidence though, but I plan on loading up a sniffer tonight and watching the traffic, from the launcher to a game, and see if I can get a nice graph to shed some more light on it. I was just wondering if it was general knowledge or not.
* By speed, I mean max bandwidth in Mbps, and not packet turnaround time