[jimmy]

Maybe you are using something other than cable? adsl? we use NTL cable, taken over by virgin. Torrents have always afaik been 'limited' with ntl, but much much much more so with VM. on a 25 quid a month contract (purely for broadband, no other services) we were able to download around 150 mb before the connection dropped from around ~700kbps a second to exactly 115kbps.
Obviously when my website is ~1.5gig it's impossible to back it up from home with restrictions like that.
VM clearly were overselling accounts without the infrastructure there to cope with the insane speeds. I don't need 50mb for 10 minutes, I'd rather have a reliable 4mb connection all the time!

Things ARE better now - how much better I'm not sure. I didn't sign up for any sort of fair usage policy, and when Virgin tried to sell us FASTER broadband for the same price when they took over NTL, we declined and told them we wanted to keep our slower and just as expensive contract - but they imposed the download limits anyway secretly a few months later, and that's why they suck the big one.