Karoo Broadband 1500 is KC's second in line ADSL service, and is advertised as being "30x Faster [than dial-up]".

This review aims to find out how well the service performs, and hence whether this service will suit your needs.

Overview

If you join this service from a dial-up service, there is a set-up fee of £39.99, which includes an ADSL modem and two micro-filters.

Downloading

A number of sites have been tested for download speed. The following results have been seen:

If you were to download for an hour at 185KB/sec, you would have downloaded a total of 666MB.

Note: On average, a single MP3 is about 6MB in size, which equates to over 111 MP3s per hour!

Uploading

A number of sites have been tested for upload speed. The following results have been seen:

If you were to upload for an hour at 30KB/sec, you would have uploaded a total of 108MB.

Latency

The following is an overview of some timings that might be of interest:

Conclusion

Since the recent introduction of the Karoo Broadband 3000 service, both Karoo Broadband 750 and Karoo Broadband 1500 provide KC's middle of the road ADSL services, in terms of performance. (in all other respects, the Karoo Broadband services are identical)

Having trialled Karoo Broadband 3000, before Karoo Broadband 1500, this service did not quite pack the same punch, in terms of performance, but even so, downloading at around 37 times faster than dial-up, or 25 times faster than single channel ISDN, there is still not a single narrowband user alive that is capable of resisting the urge to grin incessantly, as they see their downloads fly-in!

As with the Karoo Broadband 750 service, the latency and upload speeds are consistently good, and are probably capable of keeping most broadband users happy. The price, on the other hand, can be a little mystifying when compared to the other Karoo Broadband services. The reason being that the price and performance does not seem to scale evenly between Karoo Broadband 250 and Karoo Broadband 3000, which makes both Karoo Broadband 750 and Karoo Broadband 1500 not as good value for money.

To summarise, the Karoo Broadband 1500 service only differs from its sister services, in terms of price and performance. So, if you are looking to minimise your monthly bills, then Karoo Broadband 250 is probably for you, and if you looking for the maximum performance, then Karoo Broadband 3000 is the way to go. However, if you find yourself inbetween, then the decision between Karoo Broadband 750 or Karoo Broadband 1500 is just a matter of finding the right balance of cost and performance for your needs.

Pro's

• Impressive download speeds of over 185KB/sec!
• No download quota, allowing a theoretical download total of around 480GB per month!

Con's

• Only £5 per month less than Karoo Broadband 3000, which is almost double the speed!
• Apart from the increased bandwidth, there are no other differences from Karoo Broadband 250.

Additional Notes

The KUG would like to thank KC for allowing us to trial the Karoo Broadband 1500 service for the purposes of this review.

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