Thursday, February 07, 2013

Free Bandwidth-Sort Of

In my fearless effort to discover new ways to exploit technology, I bought a device from a company called Karma.

The basic idea is this:

  1. buy our device for $79 and get 1 GB of mobile high-speed data
  2. for each friend/person who connects to your mobile hot spot, each of you earn 100MB of data
  3. it’s cumulative and doesn’t expire

Sounds like a good deal and it could be.

The coverage and connection speed (provided by Clearwire) are adequate. The trick is that it’s an MLM for bandwidth.

I don’t have too many occasions when I am surrounded by people who are hungry for bandwidth who might connect to my open “Jeremy-Karma” network, but I figured the Amtrak Acela from DC to NYC was a great opportunity.

It’s full of businesspeople and wi-fi on Amtrak is, well, horrid.

I left the hotspot on the entire trip (deliberately sat in the middle of the car) and got all of ZERO sign-ups.

Hmmm…

After you use your 1GB of data, then it’s $14 for each additional 1GB.

Not the end of the world and I like being out of contract with no monthly, but I will admit that I was hoping for tons of free data due to sign ups. Oh well.

It is possible that I picked the wrong market for this test…a lot of ppl have their own mobile hotspots on Acela or maybe ppl just don’t look for/trust open networks.

I’ll keep trying and let you know.

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