Karoo Broadband 500 Unlimited is KC's entry level unlimited ADSL service, and is advertised as being "10x 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 250.

* 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 58KB/sec, you would have downloaded a total of 210MB.

Note: On average, a single MP3 is about 6MB in size, which equates to over 35 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 at peak times, between 7-9pm, using a Netgear DG834GT router, with an MTU value of 1500 and RWIN set to 18980 on the computer used.

Latency

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

Conclusion

The Karoo Broadband 500 Unlimited service offers all of the same added extras, for instance email, web space and Usenet access as any other Karoo Broadband service, which considering the price, makes this package suitable for beginners through to serious Internet users (if they have no need for huge amounts of bandwidth).

The service is also part of Karoo's 'Broadband Unlimited' offerings, with no usage allowance, allowing you to download and upload as much as you want, without having to worry about a speed profile being applied to your Internet connection. New Internet users may however find that they will not download anywhere near 2GB per month, and would be better off using Karoo Broadband 1000 Starter.

Download speeds fluctuated between the 55-60KB/sec mark, but the performance tests were carried out at peak time, and so can safely be said to work at 10x faster than standard dial-up, and around 7x faster than single channel ISDN. This service is however around 10KB/sec slower than the last 500Kbps service offered by KC, although to be fair that service had a data rate of 600Kbps.

Uploading is also much quicker than dial-up, and much improved over what Karoo Broadband 250 offered, at around 30KB/sec, however uploading speeds can sometimes be traded off for service quality purposes, for instance if you live over 6km from your telephone exchange.

Latency is now something of a sore spot for on Karoo Broadband, due to out dated hardware being used at DSLAM level, however first hop timings of around 17ms, should not be too much of a worry to anything but the most professional online gamer. On a pleasant note however, routing has recently hugely improved on the KC network, so the days of packets detouring via New York to reach mainline Europe should be history! Of course, if you know otherwise, please Contact Us.

Some lucky users will however find first hop timings to be much lower, around the 8-10ms area and this is because they are connected to newer DSLAM's.

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

Pro's

• The same price as Karoo AnyTime, but 10x quicker!
• No usage allowance, allowing a theoretical download total of around 150GB per month.

Con's

• 500kbit grade services are no longer entry level in the UK. BT view 2000kbit as being entry level.
• Some users, especially those new to the Internet, may find that they could be better off using Karoo Broadband 1000 Starter. Please see the review of Karoo Broadband 1000 Starter for more information.

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