Contract length confusion

[#1]

In a reply to ticket 27922976 where I made enquiries about leaving PN, I was told  "Unfortunately due to your new 12 month discount contract you would need to cover the payment for your subscription up to the end of the 12 month term on 03/01/2010."
I have now just received my notification of billing for the next month and it states (in 3 places) that I'm on a monthly contract.
Could someone at PN please confirm that the 12 monthly contracts have been cancelled and that I'm free to leave PN when I wish.
Paul

[#2]

Hi Paul,
On January 3rd, you took our offer of a £3 monthly saving in return for committing to a further 12 months.
The ticket on your account states:

Quote

3. If you wish to cancel your account within the 12 month period after accepting the offer you will be required to pay the remaining monthly subscription charges and any other outstanding cancellation charges. Remaining monthly subscription will be charged at the standard rate and will include the 3 pound discount.

You're free to leave when you wish, but you would be expected to buy out the remainder of your contract if you were to leave before the 12 months had expired.

[#3]

Quote from: Jameseh

Hi Paul, On January 3rd, you took our offer of a £3 monthly saving in return for committing to a further 12 months.

Well reading that I would say I was on a 12 month contract not a monthly contract as stated in the billing notification.
Looking back I now feel that taking out this contract was one of the worst decisions I have made in a very long time. Roll on the New Year  when I can get out

[#4]

Paul - Any reason in particular you're saying that?
Anything I can help with?

[#5]

James,
The biggest problem I have with PN is the fact that usenet users seem to be treated as 'third rate' users. You are more than happy to take our monthly subs but when it comes to providing the service we have our speeds restricted to such an extent that for much of the day its unusable.
As I am at work (normally) for much of the day, my main access time is evenings which gives me the slowest speed.
Taking O2 as an example they offer unlimited downloads with no traffic shaping for less than £8 per month (to o2 mobile customers), ok during busy periods speeds may drop but at least all customers on that option pay the same cost and gets the same service.
There, moan over with, but I bet there's not a lot you can do about it 

[#6]

Hi Paul,
That's a fair point.  I have O2 at home and sync at around 9Mbps but very rarely see speeds over 4.5-5Mbps due to their network contention (which seems to have got worse over the last 6 months.
Is leaving your computer on overnight an option for you?  You can literally download as much as you like overnight and then everything would be ready for you when you get home from work.

[#7]

Theres nothing stopping me leaving the computer on overnight, but I just object to it in principle mainly due to cost. This really highlights my complaint because you wouldn't suggest to gamers or those using an iplayer to only do it at night.
Anyway I see you have the sense to use o2 at home ;). I'm on a 2Mbps fixed speed line and would be happy with half this speed during the evenings.

[#8]

Essentially I use O2 at home, partly because I have a mobile contract with them and secondly because I wanted to see what ADSL2+ was like and Sheffield wasn't due to be upgraded until the end of this month (it was almost a year ago).
Whilst I do understand that you feel that Usenet traffic is being neglected, the simple fact is that without the management practices that we have in place, speeds for *everything* would be considerably slower, latency for gamers would be poorer (I get invariably 100-200ms pings at good times on WoW, whereas friends on Pro get 20ms) and ultimately costs to both us and our consumers would increase as we'd need considerably more capacity.
Gaming traffic is generally pretty low and the amount of iPlayer traffic is *nothing* compared to what it would be if we removed restrictions on P2P/Usenet.