There's no shortage of new wireless MVNOs emerging this year promising to do something a little different on the pricing front. Republic Wireless plans to lower prices by offloading most of the daily traffic to Wi-Fi. FreedomPop promises to offer users a basic free tier of service with low priced data and voice options layered on top. Tucows' Ting plans to focus on customer service, using auto plan downgrades to save users money.

This week a Clearwire MVNO by the name of Karma launched their attempt at price disruption: a $80 hotspot where each gigabyte just costs $14. $14 per gigabyte sounds pricey until you realize that's all you'll pay each month, whereas most incumbent carriers charge a flat fee and then tack usage on top of that.

There's one interesting twist to this equation, and that's the fact you can gain free data in 100 MB chunks by sharing your connection:

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The twist is that Karma makes your hotspot into an open Wi-Fi network. When a new user joins, they are taken to a personalized page about the owner of the hotspot. Strangers can then sign in with their Facebook account and get 100MB of free browsing. For every user who does that, the owner of Karma gets 100MB of free data credited to his account. The company calls this "social telecom."

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The problem is that MVNOs don't exactly have a strong track record of success in fighting entrenched duopoly carriers with significantly better wireless footprints. Still, it's refreshing to see somebody trying to do things with pricing the incumbents refuse to do (like actually offering cost savings). More information on the $80 hotspot, which comes with 1 GB of free data, can be found over at the Karma website if you're interested.