Sorry, notifications are still shit ;)
You're right for sure. I'm on a comfy European fibre connection righ now, so everything is butter-smooth. But even on a shitty 3G connection, it should be possible to request / download a few KB in 1-2 seconds (even with a ping of 500ms).

So unless you government is restricting access, either your client doesn't have enough, or good enough servers, or there's another issue in the client - caching or whatever.