Review by bullmoose 
UPDATED: 48 days ago
member for 8.4 years, 39 visits, last login: 48 days ago
 Kuna,Ada,ID
 $30 per month (month by month)
 "It reminds me of the romantic days of overloaded modem based ISPs"
 "not a one (that is sarcasm)"
 "The jury is out, and has found them guilty of sucking!"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
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--- NEWEST UPDATES ON THE BOTTOM ---
I decided I didn't want to pay the local phone monopoly any longer, so I bought Clear and their super awesome great fun time WiMax. Having heard and read many a horror story about their service, support, billing, contracts, etc... I sprung for the month to month plan assuming it will allow me to get out more easily. 3 Meg Down, 1 Meg up for $30 a month.
Installation couldn't be easier if you're connecting computer A to modem B with nothing in between. (Assuming your computer already has a NIC). Network connection on computer set to DHCP, plug provided Ethernet cable from modem to computer, plug power into modem. Hardest part was aiming modem for best signal which consists of patience and slow and small movements every 10 seconds. Now surf! First time on, and within a couple minutes of being online, I was "captured" and forced to a Clear screen to complete my account setup.
I always have 4-5 out of five bars for signal. Nevertheless, this is the most erratic service I've ever seen. They clearly aren't paying for enough trunking. It reminds me of dial-up. You remember, you always knew when everyone was on because your connection ran like crap.! I'm pulling 400k or less in the evening, and on a good day in the morning I might get 1.2Meg. Sure, it'll rarely burst up above 2 meg, but the average download still comes in at about 1/2 the rates I was getting from the 1.5Meg DSL service I just gave up. YouTube and other video sites have gotten much more annoying now that all videos stop all the time to buffer.
...but beggars can't be choosers. I'm saving $13 a month over the $43 I was paying for the 1.5Meg DSL I had.
The Clear sales person I talked to talked out of his butt. He was uneducated about what he's selling, and I got the feeling he wanted it that way so he could sleep better. He made absolute statements about a service that you can't give absolutes! He was reading the company line, and worked hard to convince me it was gospel. So I went to a local third party vendor. He was nice enough, and knew a little more about the local area, but missed the part where I was going to get auto-debited from my account and won't have the option to change it, and will be charged a buck every time I want to change my account information.
Anywho.. I plan on calling Clear in the near future to see if there's something else going on here. I have to give them the benefit of the doubt thus far that it's a simple provisioning problem or some such thing. I'll let them make or break themselves, and post back.
...but at this point, I think it can best be summarized by quoting the immortal words of King Arthur... RUN AWAY!!!! RUN AWAY!!!!
UPDATE - UPDATE - UPDATE 28 August 2009
I spoke with Clear Tech support today. I have to say, this is some of the best tech support I have experienced in a very long time. They answered quickly with literally no on-hold time. Their native tongue was American English, and they spoke it very clearly and understandably. The clearly were required to have at least some level of competence, and if they had a script, it was limited enough to allow them to do something on their own that is virtually unheard of now... it's called TROUBLESHOOTING!! They worked with me instead of deliberately looking for reasons to get off the phone. You know they ones... The guys that say "Oh, well your computer is not attached directly to the modem and you use a gateway router, well then go away and come back when you have completely changed your configuration to match the only configuration we will support.. buh bye. Well let me reiterate, they weren't these people! They were good! They helped! They had real training! Oh, and this wasn't a fluke. I've spoken with three different folks now, and they all were comparable in their abilities. Great work Clear!
Anywho... They did identify that they have received multiple complaints regarding performance from the tower I am working off of. They told me they had already deployed their engineers to look into it. They went ahead and escalated my issue and added it to the pool of issues on that tower I would guess. I asked what kind of response I should get. They said if I don't hear anything and don't notice an improvement, call back in a week.
---UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE --- October 7, 2009
In the last month, I've contacted Clear a couple times, and did a whole bunch of trying to help them out.
Being only a mile from the tower, it's hard to get the modem to not pick it up. However, with some experimenting, I figured out that by placing the modem on the floor, and covering it in aluminum foil for a while (I don't remember how long), I could get it to drop the bars down to two. At that point, I could remove a little of the foil, and it would jump back up to about four bars, and I would have about a minute where if I did speed testing, I would suddenly get speeds I was paying for! 2.5Mbps consistently for the 3.0Mbps service I'm paying for. My only explanation for this was that I had to be hitting another tower out there somewhere, and when the modem hits two bars, it begins to look for a stronger signal. More work, and some creative work with the aluminum foil for the modem, and I discovered that if I did the magic "on the floor and cover it up" technique, and I got it to home in on another tower, I could move it back to a better position to gain a better signal, then cover it with foil to attenuate the signal in the direction of the closest tower, I could then get the modem to stay on that more distant tower for quite a while before it would eventually home back in on the closest tower. While my modem was connected to this other tower, I always got advertised speeds.
...and so it came to pass, I contacted Clear with this information. Of course, they first wanted to go through and verify my network was not the problem. They are allowed to be something more than a monkey following a flipbook, so we were able skip that part purdy quickly. Thank God they have a little common sense! I asked them to verify the theory. I asked them if they could see when my modem connected to another tower. They said yes. So I asked them to check. Then they said they could not do it, they'd have to ask the next tier support. So after 5 minutes wait, and them trying to Instant Message internally, their next tier responded back to tell me the tower my modem was "currently" on, not what my modem had been attached to. In other words, they were worthless to help. I hung up in frustration.
A week or so after that call, I received a followup call from someone. I wasn't around, so they got the answering machine. It was someone wanting to verify things were working, and the issue was resolved, and gave me the main tech support number to call. I thought that was nice, but I figured "what's the point" and never bothered. OK, so I won't fault them for trying that, but I'm at the point where I'm supposed to give them a chance to work the problem, but am also at the point where I wonder how much of my time is being wasted because even the most willing person is for naught if they aren't qualified to do the job they're in. You may mean well, but if you don't know what the hell you're doing...
Over the last couple weeks, there have been a couple outages. One was this last Friday for about 30-45 minutes starting at 5:30 PM. I thought it was nice of them to shoot me an email and let me know what was going on. That last sentence was sarcasm. They didn't call, and I was left thinking my payment didn't auto-debit or something. I use VoIP, so it wasn't like I could call or surf to check with Internet down.
They have clearly done something in the last month. Now, instead of being miserably slow and crappy all the time, it seems to run acceptably in the morning, but when everyone gets home from work, forget about it. It's so bad, I can't even consistently get enough bandwidth to support a single VoIP call. ...and yes, this is with only the phone trying to do something on my network.
I use DD-WRT on my Asus WL520-GU gateway/router. It's a good box capable of support 20Mbps across the WAN and LAN (yes, I tested). My experience has been that DD-WRT doesn't seem to have the best QOS implementation. If the modem can depend on a given max-bandwidth, it'll work by assign port or MAC address priority, but no matter what I do, I can't give priority to VoIP packets like I need to. That's a side note, and my issue. What that does mean though, is if the service becomes marginal within my network, it's because I'm not getting the speeds I'm paying for, with five full bars on the modem. At that point, if I'm on the phone, I can stop all other network activity, and get enough bandwidth for the call. However, about 90% of the time, if the call comes in after 7PM until 9PM or so (don't know about beyond 9PM), not even that will give me enough bandwidth for the call. At those times of the night, if I do a speed test, I might be lucky to get around 200k.
So at this point, I'm stuck. There's really nothing else in the area at this price point, and I need to be at this price point for the moment. I'm on a month to month plan because I wasn't going to sign any agreement long-term with these yahoos for everything I read here. That means I should be able to call them and have my service reduced to the 1Mbs service. It'll save me five bucks and get me closer to what it is I'm actually receiving. I'll then call them and complain about the service, and see if there's anything they can or will do. I really really wish I could dump these losers! I am pist and frustrated. All they need to do is keep me in the loop, give me dates, times, shoot me an email.. You know, basic customer service. Treat me like a customer and not a number and a revenue point. Otherwise, I'll become a number they don't want, one that falls within their "Churn" statistics.
I've had them for a month now. I want to give up.
Followup comments:  crws
join:2000-05-18
Vancouver, WA
 ·Clearwire
 ·Clearwire Wireless
|  Re:"The jury is still out... They need to fix known tower ..
I have been dealing with this exact issue for over a month. Completely irratic speeds, unreliable connections, good tech support that tells me the tower(s) in my area are 100 users or less, and my connectivity (CINR above 18) is stellar.
Oh yah- my issue has been escalated and the engineers are on their way!
I mean this is my issue literally word for word. My 6M/500k service pulls 1.5m/250k IF I'm LUCKY.
The latest update was that the engineers had added an additional node to the tower I connect to, and I should see dramatic improvement. Maybe, but I'm not convinced yet. Service was out- -zero- for the whole night 9/4/2009.
I am beginning to look at alternatives for my home service. The Clear mobile where I work in Hillsboro, OR is great. Where I live in Vancouver, Wa- sucks.
I have Clear unlimited w/ VOIP service (EMS911), so if their service is so bad my land line phone doesn't work reliably, then they have a serious issue that needs to be addressed pronto, or it is a bogus service promise, and I will have to fight them to have the home based portion of my contract rescinded. - this is a 51% Sprint owned company, you remenber. And Sprint just lost a huge contract lawsuit involving punative disconnect fees.
Hopeful, but guarded, I will update in a week. | |
| bullmoose
join:2001-07-01
Kuna, ID
·Clearwire
1 edit | Amen brudda! Unfortunately, I used to work for Sprint on the ION project back between 1999 and 2002. It really seems to me Sprint has gotten to deep into Clear or at least their corporate cultures match, because I am seeing many of the same failures I saw when I was there. The biggest one appears to be they once again underestimated the bandwidth needs and hunger for something other than the incumbent in many areas, and didn't staff up with enough people and qualified people to be able to move quickly to resolve issues. In other words, rolling out too much too fast. They also underestimate their brand. I hate the incumbent, but I sure don't want to go to some local yokel either. Having a big name come in with good pricing is awesome! The flood-gates of pent-up demand opens, and Sprint like usual messes it up and screws their brand name because they didn't get it right. Marketing was OK with losing a percentage in the beginning as they slowly work to resolve the issues. They were OK because I think they continue to fail to recognize how critically important word of mouth is. So, by the time they've got the bugs worked out, the customers they had are gone, and told 20 of their closest friends! They also seem to continually underestimate how magically slow the local incumbent will become when they have to provision bandwidth for the competition. Somehow believing that the 1996 telecom act protects them from that, even as they did the same thing on their local side when they owned local phone. | |
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