Bad Experience with Karma hotspot March 31, 2013

Is my experience unique?

I bought a Karma WiFi HotSpot. I work remotely a fair amount and having WiFi access anywhere is useful. The price is right at $14/GB of data without any expiration date.

I got my Karma device on Friday. I immediately opened the box, fired it up and tried to connect. It took about 10 minutes for the Karma to connect up and get ready to connect to my MacBook Pro.

The connection speed was horrid (1M down and 70K up). This compares to my cell phone running on TMobile which was getting 10M down and 4M up. Okay, maybe I was in a bad coverage area at 22nd and Geary in San Francisco.

On Saturday, I took a road trip. In Sunnyvale on El Camino (a Sunnyvale Ford), I tried the Karma again. I was not even able to connect to the Internet.

I contacted Karma support and asked them about the performance. They did the typical "cell phone provider" response of "coverage varies from location to location."

So, I'm putting it out to the Internet… how is your experience with Karma? Do you get a reasonable connection? What are your connection speeds?

Please @ message me (@dpp) on Twitter.