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Unlimited data can be a wonderful thing, especially when you spend hours on end surfing the web or streaming video. A company called Karma, which is an MVNO to sprint launched a program a couple months ago called Neverstop. It’s a data subscription plan that only cost you about $50 a month. In return you get unlimited on the go data for any of your devices that needs to hook up to the internet. It’s a pretty sweet deal since the data plan caps out at 5Mbps. Of course with every good thing there’s always the bad side. Karma has discovered that their users aren’t using the Neverstop hotspots for its intended use. Apparently, some customers are using the service as their home internet. As a result, users have reached a usage point well over a thousand gigabytes.
In retaliation, Karma informed their users that they will lower the speeds of the Neverstop service due to the high amounts of usage. The CEO of Neverstop stated that they are currently conducting test with different speeds that are lower than the 5Mbps they initially offered. We could possibly see the data speeds substantially get reduced to 1.5Mbps or 2.5Mbps. With lower speeds on the way, customers will surely become unhappy. According to a survey Karma sent out, about 59 percent of their customers said that they use the service as their home internet. Whats even more crazy is that people have found ways to use the service for their Chromecast and Apple TV’s. Using the service as a home internet service is what caused the spike in data.
As of right now, Karma is in search of alternatives to prevent people going overboard with their Neverstop service. Sadly this story isn’t anything new in the wireless world. Major phone companies like AT&T have lowered speeds on their unlimited data services to keep people from going crazy with unlimited data. In Karma’s case, they offered a cheap and reliable service that eventually got abused. Karma’s CEO said that the only way that this can be feasible is if cost were lower with better networks. In the meantime Karma will look for alternatives to fix this problem.