Berkeley has been having some bandwidth problems over the past 6 months and it seems to have gotten bad again this past week. Thus, WU uploading and downloading has been slow.
As conjur said, Setiqueue allows you to create your own WU server for your farm so that your machines won't go dry when the network connections get bad. The "public" queues are for people who only have a few machines and/or who can't setup their own queue, but need to still get WUs from somewhere to continue to crunch whenever they can't connect to SETI. Thus they can connect to a public queue to feed their machine(s) and get a few stats too.