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.