Unless I'm at home where I can use my internet connection I'm pretty much at the mercy of free wifi where I can find it. My wife and I have an "unlimited" data plan with AT&T, but that covers my smartphone. If I share that connection with any of my other devices I'm likely to get dropped by AT&T and slapped with a huge fee for "early cancellation". Instead the big carriers would rather that I purchase a special version of my other devices and pay for additional data plans.
This data gouging has got to go....and Karma is stepping up to the plate to do just that.
Karma is coming out with a $70 mobile hot-spot that uses Clearwire's 4G WiMax network. The coverage isn't as wide as the cell-phones, but if you are in one of their markets you might find it well worth your while. This map isn't showing the actual coverage, which is much more in-depth than depicted.
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| Clearwire US Coverage Map |
Battery life is supposed to be great, probably longer than your mobile device, but the special part of Karma is that your data account is independent of your device. If you share your device, you get bonus data added to your account. If you log-in to someone else's Karma you get bonus data added to your account.
This bears repeating. When you share a Karma connection (yours or someone else's) you get free data.
You get charged a flat rate for the data you have to pay for. This makes Karma an excellent wireless hot-spot for business or backup use. At my old company I bought a wireless modem from AT&T and a device that turned it into a battery powered wireless router, just on the off chance that we had a power failure at work. All I'd need to do is plug in the card, turn it on, and we'd be able to fire up several laptops and continue our work until the laptop batteries gave out. For this emergency backup we ended up paying $70 a month on top of buying the hardware.
I cannot wait for this device to hit the market.
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