Karoo Broadband 2000 Unlimited is one of KC's mid range ADSL services, and is advertised as being "40x faster" than dial-up.

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

Overview

As with all Karoo Broadband services, if you sign up for this service, either as a new customer or migrating from a dialup service, you will receive a free ADSL modem with a USB interface, microfilters and free line activation.

Note: This service was previously know as Karoo Broadband 1500.

* Free technical support is only available to users of KC's Talk packages.

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 240KB/sec, you would have downloaded a total of 844MB.

Note: On average, a single MP3 is about 6MB in size, which equates to over 140 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.

Note: The above performance tests were conducted using a Netgear DG834GT router, with an MTU value of 1500 and RWIN set to 24820 on the computer used.

Latency

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

Conclusion

The Karoo Broadband 2000 Unlimited service is one of the fastest Internet services ever offered by KC with some impressive download speeds.

All of the usual added extras, for instance Karoos virus scanned email and SPAM filtering, web space and Usenet access are included and considering there is no usage allowance, £29.99 is a very favourable asking price, matching AOL's 'Platinum' 2Mbit service.

Recently, many ISP's in BT land have started to apply usage allowances to there high speed services, and these allowances can vary from 1GB per month, for a vastly reduced price up to 15GB per month for a saving of only a few pounds per month off Karoo and AOL's prices. This means two things: only consider Karoo Broadband 2000 Unlimited if you intend on downloading more than 15GB per month, and if you do download a lot more than 15GB per month you are getting fantasic value for money!

Downloading was found to perform at true 2Mbit speeds around the 240KB/sec mark so the service works at around 48x faster than standard dial-up, and around 30x faster than single channel ISDN. Uploading is also much quicker than dial-up at around 30KB/sec, however uploading speeds can sometimes be traded off for service quality purposes, for instance if you live over 4km from your telephone exchange.

Latency is one of only two disapointing aspects to this service with first hop timings of around 16ms. Hopefully KC will embark on upgrading all of there DSLAM's in the near future to support Fast Mode DSL.

Users of this service will also find Usenet access by the Giganews powered service quite slow, as connection speeds are currently capped at 2x192kbit/sec to this service.

To sum up, this service is fast, and would suit a home with multiple computers (or just one very heavy user!) and if you download in excess of 15GB per month, you really are getting value for money in todays broadband market!

Pro's

• Impressive download speeds of 240KB/sec
• Only £5 more expensive than Karoo Broadband 1000 Unlimited, yet twice as fast!
• No usage allowance, allowing a theoretical download total of over 600GB per month.

Con's

• Latency far too high for a service of this price.
• Easily maxes out the Giganews Usenet service, so if you want to use this service for Usenet downloads, you may want to subscribe to (pay for) an additional Usenet service.

Additional Notes

The KUG would like to thank KC for allowing us to trial the Karoo Broadband 2000 service for the purposes of this review.