Latency to the internet does not necessarily have anything to do with your bandwidth. When I was lucky back in the dial-up days I could get a steady ping around 200 ms over a 56k dial up connection.
Hell, I've been having a problem in which I get ping spikes and 7% packet loss and my bandwidth is 500 kb/s through rcn cable in chicago.
Try this test:
click the start button
click "run"
type "cmd"
(a black DOS-looking window will open)
at the prompt type "ipconfig"
note what ip addy it gives you for your default gateway
type "ping xxx.xxx.xx.xx -t" replacing the xxx's with the ip addy it gave you as your default gateway.
Let it run for 10 minutes, then Ctrl +c to stop the test.
It will report your high ping, low ping, average ping and % loss. If you get a high average ping and % loss then you have a problem communicating to your first hop on the internet. This may be an indication that:
1. something within your network or computer is not working properly (you already eliminated other programs as a source of trouble)
2. Your ISP's equipment is dropping packets at the actual gateway (there's not much you can do about this except call and complain)
3. a myriad of other annoying issues such as a faulty cable/dsl modem, an atypical signal strength if you have cable, screwy TCP/IP settings on your machine etc etc.
If the ping test gives good results then you are losing packets somewhere else along your trace route to the CS server. You should go to
www.broandbandreports.com, find their line quality test and run it. It will ping your IP addy from the east coast and west coast and it will report the packet loss to you.
Honestly though, before you do any of this, ask your brother if you can bypass the router and wire directly into the internet. If this fixes your problem then you can conclude that your router/wireless is messing things up.