Karoo Broadband 1000 Starter is KC's usage limited ADSL service, and is advertised as being "20x 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.

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: On average, a single MP3 is about 6MB in size, which equates to 72 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

As this service is technically the same as Karoo Broadband 1000 Unlimited, there are no surprises here. Solid 120KB downloads, 30KB uploads and 16ms to the first hop. The only added extra missing is free technical support, which seems a bit cheeky of KC considering 'starter' users are more likely to get in to difficulty than the more experienced.

Where this service does differ however is in price, as Karoo Broadband 1000 Starter has a 2GB per month usage allowance. This has allowed KC to make this service £10 per month cheaper than Karoo Broadband 1000 Unlimited.

This poses the question 'is 2GB per month enough for me?'. As this service is only available to new Karoo customers or Karoo users migrating from dialup, the resounding answer should be yes!

To find out what you can do with 2GB, KC have put together a guide, although KC do not provide any specific means of knowing how much you have downloaded in a month. Hopefully a data tracker will be added to the Karoo Control Panel in the near future if KC decide services with usage allowances have a future in there service line up.

Interestingly though, when you have been subscribed to this service for 6 months the price rises to £17.99 per month - the same price of Karoo Broadband 500 Unlimited. This is probably because KC expect users of this service to be easily downloading more than 2GB per month by this time, and will be forced to change to an 'Unlimited' service, but unless you want to take a speed cut and move on to Karoo Broadband 500 Unlimited, you are going to end up paying £7-10 per month more for Karoo Broadband 1000 Unlimited. Tricky!

In reality though, the above situation will probably never arise with too many Karoo users, as the face of the broadband market in the UK is constantly changing, and 500Kbps services are now well past there sell by date.

Karoo Broadband 1000 Starter is (at least for 6 months) cheaper than Karoo AnyTime, so anybody still straggling along on a dialup connection reading this, call the sign up line now on 01482 602300!

Pro's

• Always on connection, which allows simultaneous use of both the Internet and phone.
• Download speeds of around 120KB/sec easily achievable.
• Cheaper than Karoo AnyTime!

Con's

• The unconditional price rise after 6 months.
• No way of knowing when/if you have downloaded 2GB per month.

Additional Notes

Since the KUG reviewed Karoo Broadband 1000 Starter, KC have tweaked the service slightly, so downstream speeds of around 125KB/sec are now possible.

The KUG would like to thank KC for allowing us to trial the Karoo Broadband 1000 service for the purposes of this review.

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