No I'm not with Astraweb, I will never go back to them and thats after using them for just a week, I use Supernews.
Tested on freeware version and it appears the problem was server side, weird as I have never had this happen with Supernews before (just luck maybe?). Back to top download speeds this morning.
Just sheer coincidence by the looks of it. Or more worrying, my ISP could have been "traffic shaping" me even though I use SSL.
Thankyou for your replies and apologies for my impatience.