According to this Maven guide there's a new way to set up timeouts.
I changed my ~/settings.xml
that now reads like that...
<server>
<id>central</id>
<configuration>
<httpConfiguration>
<all>
<connectionTimeout>120000</connectionTimeout>
<readTimeout>120000</readTimeout>
</all>
</httpConfiguration>
</configuration>
</server>
It seems to work in my case. I tried with an unexisting repository and it seems to fail far quicker than before, when I set both timeouts to 5000. Can you give it a try ?