Karoo Broadband Max Farce
Today, Kingston Communications ‘upgraded’ my line to their new 8Mbps Karoo Max offering. I signed up for the ‘Option Three’ tariff at £24.99 per month which involved agreeing to another 12 months of service.
Oh, imagine my glee as I looked forward to downloading some nice shiny things to play with.
I went on over to the Ubuntu website to grab the LTS server ISO. Giddy with anticipation I began to download…
Ho ho ho - What’s this? this isn’t very good, 48 kB/s, I’ll try another.
After visiting several mirrors, download speed testers, gypsy fortune tellers etc, I found I couldn’t get a download speed greater than 50 kB/s.
Of course I immediately called Karoo technical support. After hearing an engaged tone on the first 10 attempts I finally got escalated to the privilege of listening to an unanswered phone ringing.
Eventually someone answered, that someone was Sanjay…
KC “Hello Karoo Technical support, Sanjay speaking, can I help you?”
ME “Ah yeah Hi, I’m having some problems with my broadband connection. You upgraded me today, and I’m not able to get a download speed higher than 50 kB/s.”
KC “You are aware of the bandwidth shaping sir?
ME “Huh?”
KC “Yes sir, between the hours of 8 am and 12 midnight we restrict customers download rates so that web-surfing and email is optimised.”
ME “WTF - You shape 8Mbps down to a 50kB/s download speed which is over half as slow again as the old package I was on?”
KC “Yes sir, it is to ensure customers are having a good internet experience.”
ME “I’m not having a good internet experience Sanjay…”
It seems I’m not alone either, the Karoo User Group is also getting reports in of adverse bandwidth throttling.
Why then Chris, I hear you ask (well, metaphorically speaking of course…) why don’t you move to another Internet Service Provider who is well, less shit… Well my friend, unfortunately because I live in Hull, the land that BT forgot.
That’s right folks, our incumbent teleco provider is Kingston Communications and they won’t unbundle their lines for anyone! You want broadband in Hull, you use Karoo from KC, and in a monopoly customer service is a novelty concept.
I can only recommend to anyone thinking about getting Karoo Max. DON’T DO IT !
———–
Update:: If you are a broadband max user seeing these terrible speeds then change your proxy to proxy.karoo.co.uk:8080 - Looks like they forgot to bandwidth limit the proxy Moowahahahaha!
Update: After being approached by a fellow Karoo user for help, Just Uber was happy to give a home to The Unofficial Karoo User Forums. They’re run by a nice chap called Dylan who is trying to build a place where Karoo users can talk about their experiences. You can find me in there under the name lefty 
This entry was posted on Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 at 10:15 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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December 4th, 2006 at 10:25 am
You may have found a temporary fix with using the Proxy, but once more users realise this, the proxy will simply get slower and slower, putting you back to the 50kb/s download speed Karoo are willing to provide.
It is pathetic and I hope Watchdog, Which and other consumer groups get involved to highlight on a national level how sh*t Karoo are in providing a “good internet experience” !!
My regrade hasn’t yet happened, and I will be requesting to them that it doesn’t now. I’ll stay on my 3000 service (3meg), where I see 365kb/s download consistenly, no matter what time of day it is.
December 4th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
This is true Martin. I can only hope that most of the users on the service don’t visit the Karoo User Group website or justuber.com to find out about the proxy workaround!!!
I think the big issue is that no one is interested in unbundling Hull, because the customer base is too small. Even if they did show interest Karoo would put them off with expensive unbundling charges…. What can we do?
The Karoo user group is advising people to stay away from the regrade. Hopefully Karoo will pull their fingers out and get this sorted!
Let me know what they say to cancelling your regrade.
December 7th, 2006 at 12:22 pm
I have just cancelled Karoo Max and decided to stay with the 2meg that I have had all along, I spoke to the Tec line yesterday as they had sent out the wrong info for me to alter username, was not impressed with the feedback
“like you must have sent us the wrong info re your modem”
“sent that” said I
“you could have forgot”
“no you confirmed in an email that you had all the details you needed”
“well ring tomorrow and we shall see what we can do” so I rang and cancelled the change over will think about it again when they have sorted this mess out. I asked if they had any idea when that would be the answer was “NO IDEA”
I was asked why I wanted to cancell, I said “have you read all the adverse reports on the internet, some even advice not to change over, you must be aware of the comments” there was no answer to this.
December 7th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
Hey there. The Karoo User Group reports that the service is getting better. I’ve personally found that it’s improving slowly….
Apparently they didn’t get all of the kit to run 8 meg before they starting selling it! As they’re bringing it online speed should improve.
If you check out the Karoo status page, you’ll see Karoo is currently performing maintenance on ADSL to resolve the poor speeds.
As your conversation with them proves Brian, Karoo can’t communicate for toffee. I’d still advise people to stay away from Broadband Max till it settles down, but at least this cloud has a silver lining or so it seems….
December 23rd, 2006 at 8:31 pm
Checking the Karoo status page today, the maintenance on their ADSL network seems to have ended. Improvements anyone?
Currently I’m getting 801 kb/s via an external speed test, and 2.21 Mb/s from Karoo’s internal speed test servers… Looks like they’re still heavily throttling bandwidth then. I’d also like to point out, that I’m not a heavy downloader and have come nowhere near the acceptable user limit….
January 7th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
I was on the 512K basic package and upgraded…lol as the max service (even the basic package) had to be faster than that. Seems inconsistent, 1 day 365kb download , next 30-70 kb . Hope they sort it soon.
January 15th, 2007 at 3:41 am
Yes the new 8mb service sucks, DO NOT upgrade, KC are ripping off the good people of HULL because they know there is no competition.
I spoke to one of the KC techs on a one to one personal level and here are his words and I quote
“Karoo’s 8mb MAX Broadband package is a joke.”
Stay away people because as long as KC have no competition in Hull like NTL/Telewest we the good people of Hull will be Paying twice the price as the rest of the country for half the speed!!!
January 28th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Well what can we say about Karoo’s new services that they are providing.. Well it just like the rest of the services that they have provided a bit poor and haven’t quite understood what this service is. But its only a small area Hull so it doesn’t matter. Maybe in a years time they might have get it working right.
Just like good old KIT, brought out too early and they had no infrastructure for it or even had enough knowledge to bring in out properly.
Well will KC get any competition in HULL for providing telecoms, erm not really to small customer base to even think of anyone to come in. Cost to much to establish a telecommunication infrastructure… (i.e. cost to much to put all the lines they need in)
February 17th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
ONE THING TO SAY!!!! KAROO, YOU ARE SHIT!!!, KC HAS THE MONOPOLY IS THIS SHITY TOWN, WATCHDOG, WHERE ARE YOU?????
February 22nd, 2007 at 10:37 am
Same thoughts here. They are a complete rip-off and to make it worse they have started to advertise on the local radio (Viking) and they just take the piss !!!
The woman goes on about being on Karoo broadband and Talk 2 phone package and its great value for money!!! There is a number to ring if your package is not saving you money, so I called it and told them what I thought and they cut me off !!!! Wankers.
March 26th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
I’ve been on Karoo Broadband at £24.99 a month for nearly four years now and thought it was pretty good until I realised that people elsewhere are getting faster connections for less.
You’d think that us suckers in Hull would have the best broadband in the world given KC only have to set up an infrastructure for one little town. They probably could do this but, well, everybody knows what they’re like…
April 17th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
me on option 1 and getting round 850k a sec from 1am to 9am then round 500k a sec from 9am -6pm then around 100k till 1am so me pretty plz with the speed
April 17th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Well it looks like Karoo are pulling their socks up a little. Where I live they seem to be replacing the overhead telephone lines, and engaging new hardware to bring the line speed up. Although they haven’t quite got to my house with the line yet, they have moved me onto different hardware at the exchange which has brought me up to 360kbits. This still isn’t anywhere near the theoretical limit though yet….
April 18th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
any 1 seen the crapy 1 port routers u get when u sign up for kc
August 23rd, 2007 at 7:31 pm
I’m just about to move to Hull from Gy and getting connected is my main priority since I need the net for my work. I didn’t know about KC’s monopoly - but I’m hoping it won’t be all bad. I saw 18 quid for 1 meg b/band with 2gig monthly limit and I nearly had a kitten! Reading this thread though it seems the site must be way outdated. Is there still a limit though, can anyone tell me? But I still can’t believe in this day and age that this kind of monopoly is allowed to happen unchallenged.
August 23rd, 2007 at 8:08 pm
Hi Ian,
Check out:
http://www.karoo.co.uk/broadband/which_karoo_are_you.asp
It shows the current packages you can get. Check out my more recent posts about Karoo however. At the moment they seem to be bandwidth limiting heavily in the evenings… It’s a PITA.
Cheers
Chris
September 12th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
Karoo Broadband Max service started at 7600/512 and has from time to time monotonically decreased and is now at 1152/448 (Kbauds). By extrapolation should reach dial-up speeds from above very shortly!! ADSL “modem”/router shows 41/25 dB on transmit during daytime but falls to 41/(6->15) (noisy) at night. It’s time to get some optic fibre in Kingston!!
September 19th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
ALL karoo customers should NOW get together and create an online petition to present to our member of parliament and the trading standards bureau. Maybe the monopolies commission too?
I only get 19% of my expected bandwidth at best; it’s usually worse than this!!!
If that is the best they can do then I should only pay for the bandwidth I actually have available; therefore I should only pay 19% of my monthly subscription charges, that would be much fairer and I’m sure EVERYONE out there would agree with this? - So what can we ALL do about it NOW. We (Karoo customers) must unite and pull together as an online community otherwise our complaints will fall on deaf ears or even NO ears at all! Can anyone suggest how we might go about achieving a satisfactory result?
September 19th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
F.Y.I. I wrote to watchdog; maybe we all should?
HERE: http://www.bbc.co.uk/consumer/tv_and_radio/watchdog/contact_index.shtml
Thank you for taking the time to write to BBC Watchdog…
Because we receive so many emails, faxes, letters and phone calls, we are unable to respond personally to each and every one. However, your correspondence will be read by our research team and if we are able to pursue your complaint, a researcher from the Consumer Unit will contact you.
Once again, many thanks
The Watchdog Team
September 25th, 2007 at 10:01 am
I have also wrote to watchdog. Like Paul says if we all start pestering people like watchdog something might get done about this farce we call KAROO!!!
September 25th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Done some more research and it seems the case for KC’s Monopoly was referred to the European Commission in August 2007 by Diana_Wallis (Lib Dem European Parliment member)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Communications
Fingers crossed
November 12th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
I signed up for the cheap 8mb pack about 4 months ago. To start with I was getting DL speeds @ 0.8mb a sec sometimes as much as 1 mb a sec (in the mornings). Now the most I ever seem to get is 0.4 which to be fair is better than the crap i got from BT down south but it is a bit of a drop and i cant see why. It is 21:21 atm and i can dl at 10kb/s rubbish really.
December 4th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Further to item 17. There seems to be an improvement in the line attenuation and Noise Margin during the last 10 days on my line. I contacted karoo technical help on 606101 and commented favourably on this. I asked the engineer to set a higher sync speed (3456/448). After dark I still see very variable noise margins much as before, but the line seems to have held up at the higher sync rate. Now during daylight hours I see noise margins of ~15db. It’s too early to say whether the line will be considered “stable” by karoo, but the extra throughput is certainly welcome. It’s a compromise between line speed and reliability. I would settle for lower speed at night with higher daytime speeds. Unfortunately manual intervention seemed necessary to tweak the sync rate. Maybe the necessary equipment can be programmed to achieve such individual “profiles”?