 Re: Tiscali Joke
I have an idea as to what might have happened. It's a dirty trick IMHO, but this might just explain it.
There are, at most ISPs now, two capacities which they allow you.
The first is the "instantaneous" speed of the line, which in your case is 1 megabit per second (1Mbps) - ostensibly due to the relatively poor quality of your phone line. This is the number they usually advertise and quote.
The other "capacity" is the number of gigabytes (GB) of traffic you're allowed to transfer per month - this was originally intended to stop compulsive downloaders from ruining the service for everyone else. However, you have to look very hard to notice this - it's usually under "Fair Usage Policy" or some such.
Some "light user" packages have as little as 1GB of traffic allowance per month. To put that into perspective, it would take about 2 and a quarter *hours* for you to download that much on your 1Mbps line, if you got hold of a handful of large files at once.
If you really have a "cheap" service due to the low 1Mbps line speed, they might have automatically put you on a "light user" tariff.
It is therefore extremely easy to break that limit by accident, even with "normal" web surfing and e-mail. Especially if you have a teenage daughter!
Once you break the limit, the ISP can do one of two things: they can slow down your connection so that you aren't interfering with other people, or they can simply charge you for the extra traffic. This is usually on the order of £1 to £2 per GB. They probably did the latter - this is why they said it was for "excess downloading".
It sounds like they didn't make the so-called "fair usage policy" clear to you when you signed up. This is a clear no-no. Any recourse you take should probably focus on that issue. | 
