So, what's up with my nntp rate tonight???

[#1]

I've been waiting all evening for midnight, so I can get headers and do some downloading. During the wait, I ran some speed tests for a laugh. I quickly stopped laughing... 
My speeds ranged from 250kbps up to about 1200kbps; mostly around the 600ish range. BT speed test gave this at about 8pm:
Test1 comprises of Best Effort Test:  -provides background information.
    IP profile for your line is - 6500 kbps
    DSL connection rate: 448 kbps(UP-STREAM)  7616 kbps(DOWN-STREAM)
    Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - 1732 kbps
That's the highest reported speed I got from anywhere! I ran tests up to about 10pm and never saw anything good. I even went downstairs and pulled the front off my master socket, plugging my router into the test socket. I rebooted a few times. No improvements. I took my firewall out of the equation and just had a direct, PC-with-public-IP connection through my half-bridge router. No change. Now I've got to put it all back together again 
Just before midnight, I did another BT speedtest and got 4973kbps. OK, I thought, that's not too bad.
Midnight comes and what do I get? 30kBps of download speed into newsleecher!!! It's not them - I have tried all their servers just to make sure. This persisted up to about 12:25am when it jumped up to an entire 150-200kBps. Wow! Now it's varying up and down from a few dozen kBps to about 200 max.
My download queue is currently estimating about two months to finish. Hmmm...
So, what's up 
Rick.

[#2]

One of the PlusNet gateways failed earlier this evening. See http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1206472744.htm for details.

[#3]

Hi Rick,
As psross mentioned, we dropped a central yesterday as per Bob's service status announcement over @ http://status.plus.net
This will mean that our other centrals are considerably more full than they would be usually and as such we were forced to take measures ensuring that the impact on "gold" traffic was minimal, meaning that advanced traffic will have suffered.
Whilst network balance should be restored naturally, this does take time and in the interim, I'd suggest rebooting your router as this may land you on a quieter central, giving you improved speeds.