It shouldn't take that long to get out of standby mode Are you hearing a lot of disk activity while the ectra connections are being enabled? If so, that's OS X swapping or activating virtual memory. The easiest way to reduce that is to have lots of free hard disk space and real memory.

(I'm still on Panther, so I can't easily confirm)

btw, there's no setting to disable the standby mode, which is really important for saving precious bandwidth, especially if you want to leave LW running 24/7