KARMA HOTSPOT

Recently I purchased a personal WIFI hotspot called Karma. It is a 4G LTE cellular modem that packages the cellular bandwidth as an 802.11 b/g/n WIFI hotspot for up to 8 users at a time.

Karma is a pay-by-use system, where each gigabyte of bandwidth costs $10-14 (depending on how much you buy at once). It never expires and there are no monthly plans.

The system is perfect as an emergency hotspot when you’re traveling if WIFI isn’t available. Since you only pay for what you use, you can be a sporadic user and not worry about wasting a monthly fee on unused bandwidth.

However, since you are paying by usage and not a flat monthly fee, you need to be aware of and vigilant about background applications that might be subtly flogging your bandwidth and end up unexpectedly costing you money. It was this dilemma that lead me down the rabbit hole researching automatic bandwidth throttling in OSX and how to set this up so the Karma hotspot doesn’t accidentally run up a big bandwidth bill.

This actually happened to me shortly after I first starting using Karma, where I racked up over $100 of bandwidth usage in two days from unchecked background applications left on while connected to Karma.

FIND THE HOGS

After talking to Karma about the situation* – background apps unintentionally using bandwidth – I knew the first step was to identify which background applications are the biggest offenders, and either find a way to throttle them, cap them, or turn them off when I’m on the metered Karma connection.

I didn’t want to limit my overall system bandwidth while on the Karma hotspot, but I did want to eliminate any non-essential bandwidth-hogging tasks, such as online backups or file transfers. An overall system-wide bandwidth throttling solution was not the answer. I would need something more granular.

First I used Little Snitch to see what was using background bandwidth. The biggest three offenders were:

Each of these applications serves a different function, so for each I used a different tactic:

Chrome tends to use a lot of processor power and bandwidth to sustain the myriad tabs we all keep open. An excellent way to keep this in check is The Great Suspender extension. This will “suspend” tabs after a certain period of inactivity, eliminating their processor/bandwidth load, but making it simple to revive them when you need them back.