Karoo Broadband 3000 unlimited remains KC's top of the line ADSL service, and is advertised as being "60x 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

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.

* 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 360KB/sec, you would have downloaded a total of 1296MB.

Note: On average, a single MP3 is about 6MB in size, which equates to over 216 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 47KB/sec, you would have uploaded a total of 168MB.

Latency

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

Conclusion

First things first, this service is seriously fast! However, even if you have the need for speed, the £10 difference between Karoo Broadband 2000 Unlimited and this service will stop and make you think how badly you want all that bandwidth!

Download speeds of around 360KB/sec are easily achievable from most sources, yet surprisingly, web browsing does not really seem much quicker than on any other Karoo Broadband service. This can probably be put down to the websites themselves though, as most web pages are quite small, and hence with pretty much any broadband service, they tend to appear almost instantly.

Other services, for instance the Giganews powered Usenet service, are also unable to take advantage of the bandwidth on offer. So, if you are looking for faster Usenet access, then you will need to subscribe to (pay for) an unrestricted Usenet service too.

Karoo Broadband 3000 can also achieve faster upload speeds, compared to the other Karoo Broadband service, and is advertised at 384kbit. This is a feature that many users have been wanting for a long time, and with speeds of almost 50KB/sec, it is certainly enough to put a smile on your face! (the KUG asked how KC decided on an upstream connection speed of 384kbit, and were informed that the decision resolved around finding the right balance of service availability, reliability, and maximum performance).

This increased upstream rate means that latency is improved slightly, as this service is around 2-4ms quicker than the other Karoo Broadband services.

To summarise, this really is the ultimate Internet experience, as far as sheer speed is concerned. Instead of downloading movies, it is actually possible to stream them! While this luxury will hit you hard in the wallet, Karoo will be adding some extra bells and whistles to this service in the not too distant future, such as a optional static IP address.

Pro's

• Blistering download speeds of over 360KB/sec!
• Faster upload speeds, in comparison to all other Karoo Broadband services, are possible!
• No usage allowance, allowing a theoretical download total of an unbelievable 936GB per month!

Con's

• Some websites and services are unable to use all of the bandwidth available.
• Apart from the increased bandwidth and marginally improved latency, there are currently no other differences from Karoo Broadband 500 Unlimited.

Additional Notes

The KUG would like to thank KC for allowing us to trial the Karoo Broadband 3000 service for the purposes of this review.