Amen to the above in bold. I'm experiencing exactly the same problems. My account will be cancelled shortly if I don't get a solution soon (or if I'm told that it's "traffic based shaping" again when it clearly is blatant throttling...I have days worth of logs to prove it)
Getting fractions of a kb/s through NNTP at the moment on my 1mb Gold account. HTTP does not appear to be much better as I can't get speedtest.net to load in any reasonable timeframe nor can I even sign into Google Talk.
I'm getting a little annoyed with the constant having to contact Keoma to reset my port or change my backbone (once a week) as well as the poor performance of these Gold accounts during the week. I cannot fathom how they are supposed to have a lower contention ratio (which in my mind should mean more reasonable speeds during working hours compared to a standard customer) if the account is all but useless during the day. What exactly am I paying more for?
Even more frustrating is that these issues are new. I hadn't experienced any issues with OpenWeb either on my Gold or standard account prior to mid-July. I feel like I'm back on MWeb who also performed well until I had issues and tried in vain to resolve them.