Karoo Broadband – Fastest In UK ?

Well, it took a while for The Truth(TM) to finally get noticed but dispite what all the hype here in East Yorkshire says, Karoo is, unsurprisingly, not ‘the UK’s Fastest broadband provider’ after all.

What? You don’t believe me? Take a look at this, lifted straight from Karoo’s own website front page in all its glory.

karoo-fastest-1

Wow. Well, they’re keen enough advertise it gloat about it and if Broadband Choices say it’s true then it must be true …
Just don’t ask Ofcom to verify that though. Take a look at their latest release today portraying something very different.

karoo-fastest-2karoo-fastest-3In fact people in Kingston-country, forced to use no-one but the alledged UK’s fastest broadband provider score lower average speeds than our friends in BT land in Leeds. And York. And Liverpool. And Oxford. And Manchester. (I could go on!)

But that’s not all … it’s only now I’ve decided to see how Broadband Choices do their speed tests.
Broadband Choices’ speed test is based upon the ever growing Ookla speed test, as found here.
This test is indeed pretty reliable if you’re floating somewhere in BT Land but if you’re lucky enough to have Internet supplied by Kingston Communications’ Karoo then you’ll notice that the speed test’s default server to do a speed test with is a server based actually on Kingston’s own network. Do a speedtest on your own local network, you’re bound to get a speedy result. Do another speedtest, this time onto another server, say in Manchester then the results do come out different. Your local network speed on Kingston is evidently not the Internet speed you’re going to be getting all day every day. That said, this figure has fluctuated a lot recently and maybe they were just having a bad day.

Also, notice how the reported speeds are based on public submissions, not on true network tests? … and that they were only number one on the speed list for one month? Over two years ago back in 2009? Milking it a bit don’t you think?

Don’t believe everything you read!

UPDATE: 6 July, 2011

Apparently speedtest results were indeed being throttled in the recent past. My latest attempt at speedtesting seemed to be okay but as mentionned above, past attempts have shown very different shoddy results. Thanks to Shinaku, my claims to the above have been confirmed.

http://shinaku.com/post/503529972/karoo-throttling

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