I managed to complete the updates after 45m, I followed your suggestion and bounced the template VM and rerun the 'dnf update --refresh' command, however the issue persists - the same painful slowness while fetching the repositories:
[root@fedora-23 ~]# dnf update --refresh RPM Fusion for Fedora 23 - Free 1.8 MB/s | 457 kB 00:00 RPM Fusion for Fedora 23 - Nonfree - Updates 546 kB/s | 57 kB 00:00 RPM Fusion for Fedora 23 - Free - Updates 0% [ ] --- B/s | 0 B --:-- ETA ---- Sent using GuerrillaMail.com Block or report abuse: https://www.guerrillamail.com/abuse/?a=UFR2AB5NVqcQmh2U93EQdRjCStifx8dDiadNcQ%3D%3D -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to qubes-users@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/80487c11d0b3debe63a24fc63c362acef463%40guerrillamail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.