How to go about cancelling mis-advertised BT Infin...

Question

Hi all,
A couple of months ago I made the mistake of signing up to BT Infinity. I signed up because it was listed as being an unlimited service and that I would get a connection speed of about 35 MBit.
I've since had several speed drops to effectively zero speed for no reason and have noticed my broadband speed dropping to about 8 Mbit during the evenings. During the past week my speed during the evenings has dropped down to under 2 Mbit and has been completely unusable to watch thinks like BBC iPlayer or 4OD. After googling around it turns out that BT's unlimited service is mis-advertised and is actually a 300GB service and that I may have gone over it. Apparently BT are meant to email you about this before you reach the limit but I got no such emails to my contact address linked with my BT account - the email address linked to this forum, bills, the one I signed up for BT Infinity with etc. I just found a warning and a speed restriction email in some weird @btinternet.com account that BT apparently set up for me saying that my speed is going to be limited for a minimum of 30 days.
I signed up for the unlimited and fast service because sometimes I have to download large data sets to my home computer during the night from work. 300GB seems a tad ridiculous for a service that can download that amount in under a day anyway.
So has anyone got any advice on what to do? I feel like the service was mis-sold to me and is grossly mis-advertised. It's not unlimited, is unstable and despite BT's adverts claiming that their network doesn't slow down in the evenings unlike competitors, it does slow down significantly (unlike any other ISP I've used in the last ten years). I'd like to get my account cancelled, money refunded for poor service and mis-advertisement and I'd like to go back to my original provider (Be broadband). I'd rather get 14 MBit 24/7 that is solid as a rock with an actual unlimited service than 35 MBit sometimes, 8 MBit others, 0.25 for a few hours here and there and with a download limit.

Answer 1

It seems I'm not alone. spec_d, expecting a residential package to perform as advertised is my mistake. Downloading 300gb of data during off peak hours on a superfast connection isn't unreasonable in the slightest and cjr_chris has just illustrated another example of this. The fact that most of my 'heavy' use is work related shouldn't be important at all. I could just as easily be performing a backup or downloading some video footage from a friend's computer for an amateur film production.
When I was with Be, unlimited meant unlimited. With BT, unlimited doesn't mean unlimited at all. I could maybe understand a 'fair usage' limit of 300gb for a slow 8 mbit connection but for a service advertised as 40 mbit, I couldn't understand anything below about 1TB being 'high usage'.
The bandwidth is obviously not really an issue to them because apparently they don't count iPlayer downloads if done through the home hub thingy straight to a TV.
As cjr_chris has said, why is speed throttled during peak hours if you download a lot of stuff during off peak hours? Fair usage is meant to be there for if you're abusing the network to the detriment of others. If the network's not running at capacity during off peak hours anyway then what's the harm in people doing long downloads or long backups then?
A fair usage policy should mean that it's looked into on a case by case basis - if you're impacting the network performance (i.e. heavy downloads during peak hours) then you should be warned and advised on how to rectify things. If you're downloading loads but it's during off peak hours and isn't impacting others then you should be allowed to do so.
The crazy thing is, if I'd done these downloads during the peak evening times but kept an eye on my usage so that it only came to 290GB per month then I wouldn't have had my line limited but I would likely have caused decreased performance for other users. Instead I download a little more than that during the middle of the night, affecting no one and as such I'm penalised. That's not a "Fair Usage Policy" - that's an "Unfair and Unclear Usage Policy".