Here is Belgium.
Yeah, this is the policy of most local ISP's over here : you get a download limit of 10gig/month. If you exceed that limit, you get thrown onto "smallband" which means that they effectively cut the speed of the broadband connection to that of the level of an ordinary analog modem. When the DL counter drops under 10gig again, the connection is restored.
The *really* bad part is that only 1.5 of those 10gigs can be upload traffic, and I reach that limit pretty fast.
And yeah, it sucks.
Concerning your network problem, have you checked your cables ?