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Terabit
join:2008-12-19

Terabit to Metatron2008

Member

to Metatron2008

Re: Buildout

Clear's 2.5GHz is little match for 700MHz in terms of raw coverage. It would take clear about 4 to 5 times the cell tower to cover the same areas as 1 700Mhz AT&T/Verizon cell.

Some of their base stations, which are spotty as it is, have less than a mile radius worth of coverage. Whereas, I have been able to hit a VZ LTE tower over 6 miles away.

Not to mention, both Sprint and Clear have gone for TD-LTE, which means the coverage has a GSM type hard distance cap.

tiger72
SexaT duorP
Premium Member
join:2001-03-28
Saint Louis, MO

tiger72

Premium Member

said by Terabit:

Clear's 2.5GHz is little match for 700MHz in terms of raw coverage. It would take clear about 4 to 5 times the cell tower to cover the same areas as 1 700Mhz AT&T/Verizon cell.

Some of their base stations, which are spotty as it is, have less than a mile radius worth of coverage. Whereas, I have been able to hit a VZ LTE tower over 6 miles away.

Not to mention, both Sprint and Clear have gone for TD-LTE, which means the coverage has a GSM type hard distance cap.

Clear simply cut corners on their deployment. Instead of deploying equipment to enough building-tops, towers, etc. they tried pushing the limits of their cell sizes, AND refused to use their spectrum assets properly. As shown above, they had a ton of spectrum, yet they deployed on 10mhz and 20mhz, and then capped the speeds on top of that (1.5mbps upload cap? really? why?). So people had poor reception, higher latency than they should have, and slow speeds for "4g". As soon as T-Mobile upgraded to HSPA+, their network beat Wimax in just about every single speed test (and my TMO and ATT devices on HSPA *still* outperform my Sprint device on Wimax).

The spectrum used isn't much of an issue. Proper deployment is what really matters. And Clear simply rolled out a shoddy network.
Terabit
join:2008-12-19

Terabit

Member

Speed was indeed a big issue for WIMAX and as you pointed out, they way they built the network was ridiculous when considering all the spectrum they have. The second 3.5G HSPA+ beat them, it was game over. VZ's LTE just destroyed them.

Second issue was wasting the 4 year head start they had over everyone else.

The other issue was the biggest of them all and that was the crappy indoor coverage and extremely limited coverage caused by the 2.5GHz frequency. In fact, various people were literally told to open their windows to be able to acquire signal.

Not to mention, rather than build like the rest do and expand sequentially, they had one tower here and another arbitrarily there. This resulted in massive coverage blackspots. Whereas, the main carriers are expanding mile by mile.
« SoClearwire wireless dialup is a joke »
This is a sub-selection from Buildout