Most ISPs figured that out 10 years ago. I'm not sure why you state "That's largely within the FCC's latest net neutrality rules, though Clearwire has done a poor job of transparency. I tried Clear a while back here in Portland, but I came to the conclusion that the technology just isn't ready yet. I was living in a new townhome at the time that had high-quality double-pane windows. The only place the Clear modem was able to get a signal was next to one of our front windows which was fine , but it could only get a signal when the window was open.
I got a nice fast 4 bars on the modem with the window open, and bars and essentially no connection when the window was closed. I've heard similar reports from other people; old single-pane windows or an externally-mounted antenna aren't a problem, but even in areas with high signal strength a well-built structure can block enough of the radio waves that it becomes useless.
At least they didn't hassle me when I returned the whole thing and canceled my service; I've heard horror stories about that too. I don't know that I'll be with Sprint much longer they're regularly pissing me off but I'll be happy when they ditch these bozos for LTE. A few years ago I was told explicitly by Clearwire technical support that the reason for my throttling was due to Bittorrent. Whether they meant that they throttled bittorrent as a policy, or whether the use of Bittorrent pushed my upload rate up which resulted in throttling was unclear.
What was clear was that I was very dissappointed in their service. And as for the ponzi thing, when I canceled my account they did offer me incentives to either find someone else to take it over, or recommend other users to their service, so that could be considered a form of me recruiting more investors. I dunno. I had Xohm when it rolled out here in Baltimore.
It was good enough for my uses and easy as hell to set up and move. Then they rebranded as "Clear" and within 6 months I think they had oversubscribed because I did really start to get throttled a lot. Streaming video was pretty much unusable for a couple of months.
Lately it's gotten better but I'm hoping I didn't just catch it on a less busy night. At the same time, I really want a certain amount of bandwidth. It doesn't matter how cheap it is if it's not enough to handle what I want to do. I'm holding off until this summer when our DirecTV contract is up. That's when I'm cutting the cord and will really need a reliable ISP. I have Clear and I'm fairly happy with it, but I do have issues which may very well be related to this.
In terms of checking email and surfing around the Chicago area, Clear has been great. We can use it on the train, on the bus, in the car, and it usually just works and is fast enough. Sure, there are areas where coverage isn't that great and it cuts out, but that's to be expected. What it's not good at is watching YouTube or any other type of online video. The throughput is way too variable, and goes from not great to sucky very fast and makes watching a HD Vudu or HD YouTube video on your big TV at home a near impossibility.
DSL may not be that fast, but the consistency is becoming more and more important. I used to work for Clearwire in Nevada. Not only did they block certain ports try using a VoIP program but they regularly throttled customers, and I helped with that. One of my responsibilities was to check individual data usage in our market and, if I saw someone using over a certain limit, I throttled them down to kbps. I can't remember what the limit was, unfortunately, but it was pretty low.
In addition, the termination fee system was a total racket. So what if, per Clearwire's terms, a customer is eligible for a waiver? He'd deny it anyway. For example, we had a customer who was pretty close to the edge of the coverage area, but he'd had decent service for several months.
Then, because that area didn't get the subscribers Clearwire was hoping for, the tower that serviced that area was reduced from three to two transceivers. This particular customer was no longer able to receive a signal. Myself and another technician went to his location and confirmed that there was no signal, and requested an ETF waiver. I've never worked for a business where a dissatisfied customer put on an A-frame sign saying something like "This business sucks!
Thanks to Clearwire, I got to witness that twice in six months. Needless to say, I don't work for those bastards anymore. GCI here in Alaska does this. Advertises unlimited, no throttling, then throttles down to dialup speeds, 22MB my arse.
ACS used to do that here but they are not a broadband provider, only 3MB down , but they wised up when they realized they violated laws Looks like the company in this article have no clue I just don't really have anyone less crappy to go to if I leave.
With Comcast I can deal with the same company who screwed up my billing multiple times and a year after canceling, sent collectors after me claiming I never returned a set-top-box seriously why would I still have the receipt a year later?
The only reason I am dealing with Clear still is because I seriously want some competition. Looking at speedtest. As follows, the bandwidth I can expect averages based on speedtest results : Comcast - 3. I know for certain that I've seen much higher speeds on all of these but it's telling that the choices are so poor.
Considering the relatively low cost of putting up Wimax towers, I would really like to see this take off. They just need enough buy in and investment to do it in a less shitty way. I've always thought Clear was fishy. I called them once to ask about their services, and the person I spoke to was just a real scumbag, huckster sounding person.
I had a bad feeling about them and just stayed away. Not unlike how I signed up for Netflix even though the Blockbuster deal sounded better. Just didn't smell right. A good friend of mine got clear middle of last year.
As a company precense, they just don't seem "polished. There is no formal support for Windows 7 and their "highly trained support professionals" have no idea what they're talking about. Additionally, the online August drivers for Vista failed to install. What I ended up doing was opening Device Manager in Windows and doing a manual "Update Drivers" and pointing it to the drivers folder on the October CD that the device came with.
So, basically, old drivers and new software. They promised it'll work someday with Windows 7. Maybe it will, but until then, I'm MacGyver. Too soon to tell. Is it a great idea? Wireless that works over miles? I'm all over it. We will see. Until now, I'm going to give it a go. Dear Reader, post your ClearWire experiences in the comments! I'll update this post as mine observations change.
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way. Sponsored By.
About Scott Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. About Newsletter. Hosting By. Share on Twitter or Facebook or use the Permalink. October 10, When I had ClearWireless as my backup Internet connection, I kept having issue with the fact I have large tree around my house, and thus would have weak or no signal.
It did not last long as my back up solution. Sounds like they use the same infrastructure. Clearwire has earned a special place on my shit list, because they took advantage of my dear Mom, praying on her naivety and lack of tech savvy.
Her long story short is that she went from dial-up to them. I didn't find this stuff out until I tried using the service at her house. Here's the crap they pulled: - The unit she had installed was supposed to have a built-in wifi router. That's right - Kilobytes. Since she was coming from dial-up, she didn't know how it should've been like.
I found out that in her area, there's a plethora of customer complaints, and I'm surprised the company still has a presence there at all.
The local business bureau recommended that people contact the Attorney General's office in the company's home state I think that was somewhere on the West coast - these incidents happened in Minnesota. So, if you have a good experience, great. But if you don't, please don't hesitate to use your powers of communication to let others know. Scott: Have you had any latency problems with games, skype, video chat, etc?
No latency problems at all. I was on a Video chat today for nearly 2 hours with nary a problem. I was sitting on the patio at the Beaverton Chipotle. I called my wife via Skype afterwards, again, no problem. Wow, that's messed up I'm sorry to hear about that with your Mom.
How did she get hooked up on Clear? I would definitely say that they are trained to sell the systems and as soon as I hit a technical problem I was basically talking to myself. Scott Hanselman. Comcast tech said it was due to 'slow internet'.
Funny nobody else is having these problems. They NW coverage is not as great as their initial maps shows. In fact they only have 4G coverage in Bellingham out of all WA Who the heck decided people in Bellingham need 4G more than Seattle area?!
Serge Baranovsky. October 12, I've read that early Clear Wire adopters were stuck with a sort of hybrid of Wimax that wasn't that great. That was part of the old ClearWire. What happened, was that a new ClearWire company was formed that was a collaboration of Sprint, Intel, Google and one of the cable companies, and given the same name as the old company ClearWire.
So anyway, my point being, that early adopters were using a different technology And may still be using it in some markets and that other markets use true WiMax tech.
October 13, I get a flyer from them at least once a month if not more. I wonder if they are based out of Seattle as they don't appear to be re-sellers that are pushing the service here. I must not be smart enough to use the OpenID login. Every time I try it sends me off to login then I come back but none of my information is entered? Scott Koon. Wolff told reporters on a conference call that the company would be able to operate independently of its investors, which would have no say on decisions such as the timing of network launches in particular markets.
It plans to fill another five board seats in coming weeks. Time Warner Cable told the Reuters Media Summit on Monday that his company expected to have limited WiMax services on offer using the Clearwire network in one or two markets in late or early
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