Karoo ISP

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Karoo

Type	Public (LSE: KCOM)
Founded	1996
Headquarters	Kingston upon Hull, UK
Industry	ISP
Parent	Kingston Communications
Website	Karoo.co.uk

Karoo a UK Internet Service Provider formed in 1996, by Kingston Communications. Although the majority of Karoo customers are in the Hull area, in Yorkshire, UK, a Pay As You Go dialup service remains for customers outside of Kingston Communications telephony network.

[edit] Service History

Before the introduction of unmetered, '0800' dialup Internet access and broadband, Karoo was the one the first ISPs in the country to offer untimed Internet calls. It followed on from the success (or over success) of the Demon Internet Point of Presence (PoP) in Hull. This was setup with the intitial formation of Demon in June 1992. Demon allowed users in Hull to make untimed 5.5p+vat calls to access the Internet via dialup accounts. Karoo followed on a few years after Demon removed their local PoP. Karoo Xtra allowed Kingston Communications customers 7 hours untimed access for the price of a 5.5p+vat call charge (and a subscription fee of £15 per month).

This led to the Hull gaining a reputation for being a so called 'digital city'.

[edit] Current Services

Today, Karoo provides dialup and ADSL broadband services, up to 8 Mbit/s with POP3 email and web hosting including in the majority of packages.

Karoo broadband services are only available to residents in the Hull and East Riding area and only on a Kingston Communications residential line. Interestingly, Karoo is the only broadband service available to customers with a Kingston Communications fixed line, leading many customers to believe Karoo operates under monopoly conditions. This, however, has not prevented local computer retailers and supermarkets from giving away copious quantities of ISP disc from the likes of Freeserve and AOL which clearly state that a BT phone line is required for use ... something as yet unavailable to residents of the area served by Kingston Communications.

The services Karoo provides are considered by many to be sub-standard, with a proportion of users complaining that they cannot go on the internet for longer than 30 minutes (dial-up) or a few hours (broadband) without having to re-connect due to their connection being dropped. This led to a website being set up entitled "Krapoo" (appears to have been taken down due to legal action). Another problem users regularly encounter is the internet going incredibly slowly at peak times, often so slowly that loading a simple website such as Google will take a few minutes.

In October 2006 Karoo began rolling out the new "Max" (up to 8 Mbit/s) ADSL services. These services are dependent on the amount of users online at the time, and which package the user has subscribed to, but in general have proved to be vastly superior in operation to the previous ADSL service, with much lower instances of dropped connections and unacceptable slowdown.