KC have kindly allowed the KUG to 'preview and review' their new Karoo RapidTime Speed1000 service (26th-28th of March, 2004).

The following review will hopefully give you a good idea as to what to expect from the new Karoo RapidTime Speed1000 service:

Overview

Details

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 120kb/sec, you would have downloaded a total of 432MB.

Note: The old Karoo RapidTime services download at around 50kb/sec (180MB 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.

Note: The old Karoo RapidTime services download at around 30kb/sec (108MB per hour).

Latency

A few trace-routes were performed on two different types of Karoo RapidTime Standard/Pro services, as well as on the new Karoo RapidTime Speed1000 service. The results of these trace-routes can be viewed by clicking the relevant links below:

• Karoo RapidTime Standard/Pro - Fast Mode
• Karoo RapidTime Standard/Pro - Interleave Mode
• Karoo RapidTime Speed1000

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

Conclusion

The first thing that will hit anyone using this service is the sheer speed of it! For those that have been using an old Karoo RapidTime service for a year or two, you will again experience that same "whoa" effect like when you upgraded from 56k or ISDN.

The 120-125kb/sec downstream transfer speeds were constant across all of the tests performed, with general web browsing showing a noticeable speed bump. The service seems willing to upload at a slightly faster rate than the old Karoo RapidTime services. This is a bonus considering Speed1000 connects at the same upload rate (288kbit) as the old Karoo RapidTime services.

Latency has also improved from the old Karoo RapidTime services, albeit by only 2 or 3 milliseconds. This is probably not 'optimal' performance, as some users have been using a tweaked 500kbit service where the first hop latency is 3 or 4 milliseconds lower than on this service. The decision to allow a slight interleave has probably been taken for connection stability reasons.

So for download hungry users and online gamers, the decision to upgrade from an old Karoo RapidTime service should be an easy one. Any dial-up or casual broadband users will have to think a little harder, as the monthly subscription is quite a step up!

Pro's

• Blazing download speeds of over 120kb/sec.
• No download quota allowing a possible 10GB per day!
• Low latency for online gamers.

Con's

• Will cost around £420 a year.
• The Karoo news service can not utilise the Internet service to its full potential.
• The Karoo mail service will still perform like sticky goo.

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