It's interesting to see your download speed. You said your ISP says you have up to 3Mb/s when your stated speed here is close to 12Mb/s. Well, at least it shows you have good speeds otherwise. The problem seems to be whenever you use SSL. Typically, you would have configured your news client to have access through your firewall. Then, if you started using an SSL server later on, it would not have the necessary permission to go through the correct ports (i.e. anything other than 119). However, disabling your firewall makes no difference.
Any router you may have had could have interfered. On my router I have to turn off a component of its firewall otherwise it bogs down as all data is more heavily protected. People are finding now that as they get higher speed connections, their older firewalls aren't as capable of handling the speed increase. Not that it matters since you have no router to contend with anyway.
Listen to Alex. He will get many more emails you won't get to read here from people using different news providers. I imagine at times he'll get a glut of emails asking why the speed is suddenly dropping and he can get an overall picture of what is happening better than I can. After all, I'm not support so I'm only able to generally diagnose problems - I'm only a busybody, really.
All I can point you to is a problem with your news provider. Email their support and tell them you get no speed through SSL. You now know your speeds are good otherwise and your firewall is not an issue which you can tell them. You should be able to use their non-SSL servers until it's fixed or if you change to another provider. I notice they don't have a status page. Any decent provider should have one so maybe they hope people will just put up with any problems and wait till it's fixed. No status page also means any potential new customers can't read through and see if there's been a recent spate of problems with their service.