Karoo Broadband 250 is KC's entry-level ADSL service, and is advertised as being "5x 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 29KB/sec, you would have downloaded a total of 104MB.

Note: On average, a single MP3 is about 6MB in size, which equates to over 17 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 16KB/sec, you would have uploaded a total of 58MB.

Latency

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

Conclusion

Karoo Broadband 250 only differs from its sister products in the area of bandwidth. Added extras, for instance email, web space and Usenet access are all included in the price, which makes Karoo Broadband 250 quite an attractive package for beginners right through to serious Internet users (if they have no need for the bandwidth).

With download speeds around the 29KB/sec mark, the service is over 5x faster than standard dial-up, and around 4x faster than single channel ISDN. Uploading, whilst being much quicker than dial-up, can still feel a little slow at around 16KB/sec, however this does enable the service to reach homes up to (and sometimes beyond) 6km away from the local telephone exchange.

Over time, latency has improved significantly on this service, and with the current first hop time of around 17ms, which is roughly a third of what it was originally, online gaming is very enjoyable, and at an excellent price! (whilst the number of hops that it takes to get across KC's network and out on to the Internet backbone may seem higher than on other ISPs, performance seems unaffected)

To summarise, this is very much a value for money service, especially for single computer homes. However, for homes with two or more computers, you may at times get frustrated with the bandwidth available, so a slightly faster service might suit you better!

Pro's

• Always on connection, which allows simultaneous use of both the Internet and phone.
• Only an extra £1 per month more than Karoo AnyTime, yet over 5 times the speed!
• No download quota, allowing a theoretical download total of around 75GB per month.

Con's

• Reduced upload speed in comparison to the other Karoo Broadband services.

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