Thanks to all who have responded. It seems like only some have this issue. The update completes very quickly but the sending stats part took forever. Here's what I did to address my issue. So, I have a laptop and a desktop. Both were provisioned via a clean install of v2016 (after running avastclear). Now, initially, my laptop showed the lag during (sending stats) but the desktop did not. FYI, my wifi speed is just as fast as my desktop (57/11) so that was not an issue. I finally did an Avast repair install on my laptop and that seems to have fixed my issue. Why or how? Who knows...
Edit: The only noticeable difference is my laptop has an OEM Win 8.0 installation and my desktop is running Win 8.1 (clean install).