Finally was able to do a wired speed test, after moving the other half of my network off Clearwire. They installed the gateway in my kitchen which is next to the living room with my DISH receiver, Wii, and Blu-ray player, so I moved that switch to the new service right away. The rear of the apartment has my bedroom and home office, with the wired Mac and PC respectively, connected to an AirPort Extreme, now reconfigured to bridge mode.
I setup the AirPort to provide 5 GHz WiFi service, since the provided Pace gateway only provides 2.4 GHz. Decided to leave the Pace WiFi turned on to service the Wii, and the AirPort to service a laptop as well as providing printer and disk sharing. All together it seems to be running well.
I ordered the 18/1.5 service, so 22+ for the download is fantastic, and 1.48 is on par with expectations. Note: I am definitely in Houston, I do not know why speedtest.net thinks the server is 600 miles away.
I will post a full official DSL Reports review tomorrow.
Edit: Got a better upstream on a subsequent test. Proves that both the downstream and upstream are over provisioned to some extent.
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Here is a Clearwire speed test I did just now for comparison. It looks impressive, for a WiMax connection, but there are a lot of caveats, that make the wired VDSL connection so much better.
Caveat: The downstream looks pretty good - but in real world use, DISH On Demand would get at most 3 Mbps. Any show you wanted to watch, would have to buffer. Same goes for Netflix - except it was possible to route Netflix through a VPN, to a 3rd party server, which Clearwire didn't arbitrarily "throttle". I am just talking about average or even BELOW average usage here. 5 hours or less per week of "on demand" viewing of either type - DISH or Netflix. Not an abuse of "Clearwire/Wireless" by any stretch.
Caveat: I'm sure a lot of people have already ditched Clearwire, thus improving speeds for remaining users. It is also 12:30 AM here when I am running the test.
Caveat: The upstream would seem to indicate 1 Mbps. Real world usage is lucky to achieve half that amount. It is possible to use a Sling box on Clearwire - at the lowest settings, with the worst picture quality, barely tolerable for viewing on a mobile device.
Remarks: It is too bad about Clearwire. They had the potential to be, and in fact they were/ARE the 3rd truly nationwide ISP. The line up could have been: Cable, Telco, Clearwire. Unfortunately it was not to be.