Karoo Broadband 750 started life as KC's Karoo RapidTime ADSL service, and is now advertised as being "15x 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 90KB/sec, you would have downloaded a total of 324MB.

Note: On average, a single MP3 is about 6MB in size, which equates to over 54 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 Karoo Broadband 3000 service arrived on the scene, Karoo Broadband 750 has been joined by Karoo Broadband 1500 in KC's middle of the road ADSL services, in terms of performance. (in all other respects, the Karoo Broadband services are identical)

The Karoo Broadband 750 service does provide a significant speed-bump over the Karoo Broadband 250 service, which probably makes this service the ideal entry-level for homes with two or more computers, as the additional bandwidth should be capable of keeping a few users happy, whether they are just browsing the web, or fully utilising the Giganews powered Usenet service.

Whilst the Karoo Broadband 750 service is by no means as fast as Karoo Broadband 1500 and Karoo Broadband 3000, it can still download at around 18 times faster than dial-up, or 12 times faster than single channel ISDN, i.e. quick enough to make you smile!

As with the Karoo Broadband 1500 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, given the Karoo Broadband 750 service only differs from its sister services, in terms of price and performance, it is probably the ideal service for multi-computers homes, where the cost versus performance scale leans more towards minimising cost.

Pro's

• Fast download speeds of over 90KB/sec!
• No download quota, allowing a theoretical download total of around 234GB per month!

Con's

• The other Karoo Broadband services provide better value for money.
• Apart from the increased bandwidth, there are no other differences from Karoo Broadband 250.

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