Resolved my eye. I received my new 27" iMac yesterday and was trying to set it up. I have 24,000 photos in the cloud and with my fiber internet, it usually takes 3-4 hours to download. It was barely moving...finally called Apple Support this morning to try and get some answers. No one on their end knew about the slow cloud services. "No one else is reporting the issue"..."you'll just have to wait it out." "Sometimes it can take a week." And this was coming form Senior Level Support. After 6 hours I have only managed to get 4,000 photos.
Reboots, resetting the modem ...makes no difference. With a 250 Mbps connection, this makes no sense. At this point I am convinced something else is wrong. I've literally have done this dozens of times without issue. I have 13 days left to return this box to the Apple store ....thats about how long I think it will take this job to finish.
Update> may 15th - around 7 pm last night the switch must have been put in high speed mode, as things suddenly jumped up. I processed more the in the next hour than I had in the previous 6 hours. By morning all was completed. Now I believe things are back to normal.