Moving more than you have to does seem pretty daft, to say the least... but unlimited means unlimited. In any other market, products have to be unambiguously advertised (even my 'unlimited' texts on my phone contract are actually advertised in the small print as '3000 per month'), yet ISPs seem to get away with this con all the time.

I fully agree with the previous comments about Ofcom putting their foot down and fixing this [censored] awful mess once and for all.

Not sure who I'm replying to here, if anyone. Just making the following points :-

It is likely that the OP would have stated in his post that he had this legitimate reason for the usage from Friday to Monday inclusive, even if it was a once-off to take a full initial backup, these being necessary quite frequently as well as incremental ones anyway.

Wasn't the problem his downloads though? Maybe he needed to download his earlier backups and incremental data created using his previous ISP, and kept screwing up the recovery onto his disc system.

If that were the case IDNet would indeed be in breach of contract. But I think it somewhat unlikely.

Apart from one mention of ftp, the OP has been a bit coy about what sort of data was being downloaded, so it's impossible to judge the rights and wrongs on that basis

In actual fact what they do say on the product in question is:-

"Unthrottled & unrestricted (i.e. no traffic shaping or port blocking)".

That technically means that there are or may be other throttles or restrictions imposed.

It is also in the FAQs that uploads are not counted even where there are usage allowances.

The OP didn't mention uploads

In reply to:

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because it was truly unlimited

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doesn't exist, AFAIK.

I appreciate that 'unlimited' doesn't actually exist in the real world... but that's not what the ISPs would have you believe when trying to rope punters into long, expensive contracts.

It should do exactly what it says on the tin. 'Should' being the key word. A shame really... it seems there are a LOT of bitter customers out there...

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Glad to not have the same problems as OP, but sympathetic nonetheless.

In reply to:

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doesn't exist, AFAIK.

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Oh, it exists alright... if you're prepared to pay for it.

And that, I think, is the point that many heavy downloaders don't seem to grasp...

We do - we're a 24/7 call centre with remote offices all connected on ADSL lines that maintain constant VPN connections to the central office.

The VPN connections transfer a fair bit of data round the clock!