I'm currently in private student accommodation (not uni halls) with a 2mb/s internet connection which I will usually get speeds of over 1050kb/s easily during the day and about double that at night when downloading through a browser however with any NZB client I get speeds of a maximum of 200kb/s no matter what port I'm using or if it's encrypted same for torrents as well
It's a paid Usenet account with UsenetServer and previously with Astraweb, I've tried using port 80 (un-encrypted, server doesn't alolw SSL on port 80) but it's still around the 220kb/s mark