Currently, we don't offer any bandwidth throttling in the request module. The HTTP library we are using doesn't support it (note that the ASIHTTPRequest wrapper is no longer maintained, so we can't use that, unfortunately...).
If we find an alternative HTTP library which does support what we need and throttling, then we'd certainly consider switching to use it!
FWIW, we've not had any customers report problems with app store rejection due to bandwidth throttling (or lack of it).
Any connection or HTTP errors will result in the error callback being called - you have control over whatever retry logic you want.
For timeouts, see http://docs.trigger.io/en/v1.4/modules/request.html#ajax - timeout is a support parameter in the options hash.