Wireless / Mobile > Clearwire > Clear in Chicago

reply to Clever_Proxy

Re: Clear in Chicago

Yes. .50 mi away.

Thanks. Are there limits to what I can run? 9an I run a mail server as I could on a DSL line? I am not concerned about reliability as it is just me as long as I have a reasonable expectation of uptime.

No idea, I'm sure everything is against the TOS, but as long as you aren't serving a 500 user exchange server I don't think they'll say shit.

Thanks. Sounds similar to a DSL line. One more question. DSL is not a shared bandwidth pipeline (except at the backend) unlike wireless where my bandwidth is a piece of the whole. How many users in a given area can be logged on before we all start to suffer slowdowns or dropped connections?

Thanks again for the fast response.

reply to EastSide
Yeah, at this point I would expect 1 "Power user" to cause more harm than a bunch of people using outlook. I imagine that they will be able to work out the kinks, but it will take time.

reply to FattyAcid
Agreed and understood before I asked. My question is prompted by the fact that they seem to be courting heavy users. Note this from their web site:

This plan is ideal for playing games, . . ., uploading, downloading videos. . .

These can be high bandwidth items. In the past wireless providers have steered away from such users. It gives the impression, right or wrong that this is a new generation of network with much greater capabilities. My question is aimed at what, if anything, makes this network better able, not just to handle the speeds offered, but handling them for the general public. How many such users can the network handle before a specific tower becomes saturated and traffic begins to suffer? I am just trying to gain a sense of the capabilities of this system as verses other companies service offerings to see if it is really different or just hype.

Well---I also don't know the antenna configurations, WiMAX profiles, channel sizes, TDD vs. FDD, etc. on Clear's network.

But if I had to guess:

Each tower has a Gigabit backhaul, three antenna sectors, and each sector can deliver a shared bandwidth of 2xx Mbps down and maybe 50-80 Mbps up.

I do wish someone knew the answer to this too!

those sound like pretty good estimates. IIRC there's 10mhz channels, not sure on the rest

Thanks to you both. That is the kind of info that I was looking for. As was said, mom and pop checking email is not going to bring such a network to its knees. But it does give me an idea of what a block full of users viewing videos or downloading DVD ISO files might do. I now have something to chew on.

Yeah well keep in mind I'm just pulling these numbers out of my ass.

If Clear uses the Motorola WAP450, 2x2 MIMO, 10 MHz channel, 4 sectors, 64QAM 5/6, TDD---I would expect less than 2xx Mbps honestly. But people have posted throughput results here that suggest 2xx Mbps is quite achievable assuming you're the only one on the tower.

So really I have no idea.

There a press release out there saying they're using the WAP450 (In Chicago, not sure about other markets), but who knows anymore. That was 2 years ago when Sprint contracted Motorola to build it out.

There's only 3 sectors, I haven't come across one with 4 yet.

There's a couple speedtest right from the tower with 2xx Mbps. I would bet that an unlocked CPE could bring about 30Mbps down.

reply to Clever_Proxy
Im getting 441kb down and 27kb up speed
is something wrong.. ? should i call them and complain its too slow
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reply to Clever_Proxy
The single sector @ 10 Mhz can do real 34 Mbps down and about 6 Mbps Up when doing MIMO B 2x2 and QAM64 5/6

No Wimax hardware support curently 4X4 MIMO nor 20 Mhz channel.

reply to LineNoise
LineNoise, do you have maps of the entire Chicago area? What about Matteson/Park Forest/Richton Park?

it would be nice if someone built a google map and posted the clearwire towers on it.

just throwing that out there :-P

reply to Clever_Proxy
Just got it today. I'm on the north side of the city in the Wrigleyville/Lakeview area. I have to say I'm underwhelmed. Glad I didn't cancel the DSL yet. I'll give it a couple more days, but after using it for 4 hours so far I think it's likely to go back before my 7 day trial is over. The upload is what's disappointing, and it is impacting my Skype calls.

reply to newcustomer
It looks decently covered. (a SHIT LOAD better than Bolingbrook) Give me an intersection and I can estimate the distance.

Clever: I pulled about 2800 coordinates (Microwave paths, but I can narrow it done to tower locations since they have microwave backhaul it'll be pretty complete) from the FCC database, if you can figure out how to put those into google, lemme know. I'm too dumb to figure it out.

How about near Wilson St and Wilson Court in Park Forest? My modem can pick up four separate towers, but I get crap signal from all of them.
As an added bonus, I have UV blocking windows and what passed for insulation when my house was built was foil covered drywall.