Anonymous from Philadelphia – Clear WiMax and Clearwire Internet Review
I have heard of WiMax since 2003, so when I heard CLEARWIRE is offering WIMAX in Philadelphia Metro area for $30 a month I was very excited. I canceled my Comcast broadband account and switched to CLEAR to save me a couple of bucks. It turned out to be bad decision.
I purchased the 3mbs download and 1mbs upload plan. The only time I come close to 3mbs is only when I connect the modem directly to my desktop, however when I connect the modem to my D-Link 615 802.11N wireless router I get nowhere near 1.5mbs download and my upload speed was around 0.15mbs. This limited speed prevents me from using MagicJack (VoIP) phone service. I can hear the person on other side of the phone, but the person on the other end of the call can not hear me at all. All they get is choppy sound, which means my downstream is okay but a lot of lag time with upstream.
I called and chatted with tech support all week last week. They asked me to reboot the modem, face it toward the tower, separate the router at least 3 feet from the modem, optimize my browser cache, reboot my desktop. None of the suggestions work, instead they blame it on my router (which is only 2 months old) and they also suggested that I cancel MagicJack which only cost me $20 a year and switch to CLEAR VoIP for $25 a month. I told them why would I switch from a service that barely costs me anything to a service that costs me $25 a month? They told me that they can’t help with my Magic Jack, I asked them to cancel service.
Luckily I was within 7 days of my initial service, so they waived my $120 ETF. I bite the bullet and switched back to Comcast and now my Majic Jack service is working fine and the sound is crystal clear again. I think WiMax is still relatively new and has lots of potential. I would recommend it for mobile internet, however I would NOT recommend it for home use. Its better to pay a little more for steady and stable land line internet connection.
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I can only speak for my situation, but I will not go back to Comcast slow 3G. No way! Never! The Clear Home and Mobile units have been giving me over 6mbs download and just over 1 on the upload. I was in one area of Atlanta and pulled 14 mbs. It’s sooo much faster than Comcast speed.
Though Clear was blaming your wi-fi router, did you verify it was not the router? Your scenario seems like the same thing my dad had. I found out later that he was using a bellsouth wi-fi router/modem combo which did not work at all with Clear. He was on the verge of sending it back as well til I came over realized what he had. Now he’s pulling higher mbs than me using his new Linksys wi-fi.
The biggest problem I see with Clear is it’s easy plug-in-play installation. The average and below average computer user will give up and cancel at the first sign of frustration/trouble since there’s no “Comcast technician” to install it for them.
Just one man’s opinion.
Hi Mike,
I appreciate you coming on here and giving a sensible statement. There is a lot of emotion on this site and a lot of vivid language too. I never speak for anyone but myself, I know my experience has been piss-poor at best and Clear has yet to show an initiative to improve it.
I always assume someone will give Clear a real shot because that may be the chance you are in a position of good service. My experience has shown that Clear is unreliable which is a very fair statement. I’ve have VERY good service in segments… but 90% of my service with Clear and Clearwire has been very bad. Not even 10% of advertised speeds.
Some of you may get lucky and find yourself with very good coverage, I however have not been fortunate with Clear as a provider.
It is my greatest wish that Clear step up to the plate and provide me with good, quality, stable service near 6Mbps down. I would love that like they cannot imagine, but they can’t even seem to regularly provide me with .10Mbps. Its truly sad the effort that I put into this website because of the lack of effort they seem to have put in my connection.
the clear service is just plain whack i tried everything in the norm to get decent speeds on it but to no avail.
I used and tested 4 different access points they did squat for me. Tried it on an old windows xp box, 2 labtops, and my overkill computer tower that i use for gaming that i built myself and still nothing. I talked to tech support and got nothing out of it really. They told me to go over some of the routine trouble shoots if i can even call them that and it made no difference i still sounded like a robot over the phone and internet was mad slow. Just to put this out there i would not say i didnt try everything if i wasnt an ITadmin at a company i did try to maximise everything a normal person could as far as what kind of security your AP’s are using cabling ect.. but nothing. I dont recomment this service sure its easy and its cheap but its still taking baby steps towards better solutions maybe try it in the later years to come as for me no thank you im done with it…..
Chicago IL area: Wow- I just signed up on Saturday for home internet and Phone service, figured I’d cancel the slow and relatively more expensive AT&T DSL/Phone. Clear gave me a temporary number for the Clear VOIP to try out the service. I got the internet hooked up fine, 4 bars consistently on the modem with 3-4 mbps but no phone service. All the equipment is brand new. Called the sales guy 2x. Still waiting for a reply. Talked to Customer service and they finally, after much testing over the phone, gave me a ticket number for an engineer to contact me. Still waiting. Good thing I didn’t cancel my AT&T. I was hesitant at first to go to Internet phone for this very reason- to be left hanging with no support and its a good thing I saw the service or lack thereof before my seven days are up.
Chicago, IL metro area: BOTTOM LINE: I would have upgraded to AT&T’s better plan with no hesitation but THEIR support is awful and in a busy intersection like mine, they STILL don’t offer anything above 1.5. It was so slow the last week I had to switch and so I tried Clear. Just signed up for the clear service tonight. Using it through my Linksys router.
True, my speed has been less than 6 Mbps after repeatedly punching the speedtest site tests. I’m going to wait 5 days before deciding I want yahoo again which already I don’t think I do. Even if it stays at an average of 4 Mbps it’s still a couple bucks more (and faster) than AT&T’s 1.5.
If they get off their asses and upgrade my area maybe. Slow connections: Try using TuneUp Utilities. I’m also using the little registry tweaker tool here: http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=157
If my speed increases at all I’ll give an update.