Personal hotspots: Wal-Mart vs. Karma

In March of this year, I took a look at the current options for pay-as-you-go cellular wi-fi hotspots—just the thing for giving wi-fi-only tablets and e-readers connectivity wherever you go. At the time, I switched over from TruConnect to Wal-Mart’s equivalent 3G MiFi, to get away from TruConnect’s $5 per month fee, and was more or less happy with it, as far as it went. But one of the other competitors I mentioned at the time, Karma, is about to change things up, and it looks like it might just be worth trying.

A lot of people with smartphones might not need a separate hotspot at all. Many of the major providers offer tethering as a standard option or added extra, making their phone into a hotspot itself. But we folks who use pre-paid cell phone services such as Republic Wireless don’t tend to get that option. And even folks who do might not want tethering to eat into their cellular data cap.

The Wal-Mart Way

Wal-Mart’s Internet on the Go MiFi service works about as well as any 3G hotspot, with just a couple of problems. First, it’s just 3G, not 4G. If you’re just checking email or social networks or doing light surfing, you might not even notice, but streaming media is pretty much a no-go, and some pages can take an awfully long time to load. But I put up with it because it’s the only game in town.

The other problem is that it can be hard to refill your account. For some reason I’ve never been able to get Internet on the Go’s online credit card refill to work. The only way I’ve been able to get more bandwidth for my MiFi has been to go to a physical Wal-Mart location (of which I don’t have any very near me, living downtown and all) and buy a time card. And whether those time cards are even available tends to be a bit spotty. That’s not exactly an ideal situation when it comes to keeping connectivity available when I need it.

Call It Karma

But Karma, who I dismissed in my previous post for its scant coverage, is about to implement a significant improvement in service area. Instead of using the old Clearwire WiMax 4G service, which was only available in a limited number of areas, they are switching to Sprint’s LTE 4G network, which has pretty good nationwide coverage in urban areas—including Indianapolis. They’re taking pre-orders for the hotspots for a couple more weeks at $149 (save $10 using this referral link), and they should ship in December.

Karma’s pay-as-you-go rates are significantly better than Wal-Mart’s. At the high end, you could get 3 GB for $45 from Wal-Mart—$15 per GB. Karma’s rates start at $14 for 1 GB, then go up to $59 for 5 GB (that’s $12 each) or $99 for 10 GB ($10 each). And that’s for faster 4G service (with 3G fallback).

What’s more, Karma users can earn extra bandwidth while they use the service. Unlike most personal hotspots, Karma’s are accessible to anyone who can pick up the signal. They can create a Karma account for themselves and get 100 MB of bandwidth free, which doesn’t count against your allotment. In fact, it adds 100 MB of free bandwidth to your account, too. Of course, having other people using your hotspot might slow your connection down some, but it’ll still be faster than 3G.

Of course, you’re not going to want to use a hotspot like this for high-bandwidth applications even so. Just something like streaming a Netflix movie could run up several gigs. But for minor mobile surfing, travel, and emergency use, $10 per GB is really quite economical.

With that in mind, I’ve gone ahead and preordered a Karma hotspot and look forward to trying it out. I’ll post a review after I’ve had it for a while. There’s a referral link that will save you (and earn me) $10 if you’d like to do the same.