Anyone know anything about "Clear 4G Wireless?"

[secretlyironic.livejournal.com]

I've gotten a number of fliers from Clear, (edited to fix URL) offering home Internet service over a 4G wireless connection. Anyone tried it? Is it any good? It's cheaper than Comcast and they say their $50/month plan is 3-6 mbps download, which is pretty good, although not as good as wired plans... 

Anyone tried it?

Comments

[beowabbit]

I have it. I live in Quincy. It works great for me; I haven’t had any problems and my bandwidth has always been fine for watching Netflix.

My officemate at work has it. He lives in Somerville (East Somerville, I think). He finds it really awful. He has lots of significant slowdowns and some outages.

As I understand it, there are two issues involved. (Take this with a grain of salt, though; I don’t really know a whole lot about it.) First, the signal is fairly short-range and easily blocked by obstructions, so your service depends on you being close enough to a tower, and having a clear enough “view” of that tower in the radio spectrum the modem uses, to get a good signal. And secondly, whatever tower you’re talking to (and perhaps the various towers that serve an area; I’m not sure) all share a limited amount of bandwidth. So if you happen to be close to a tower and have a window facing that tower, you live in a neighbourhood where not a lot of high-bandwidth users live, and it’s 3:00am, your experience is probably going to be great. If you live far away from a tower, in a unit in a concrete building without windows pointing the right direction, in a neighbourhood with lots of high-bandwidth users, and it’s a peak time, your experience is probably going to be bad.

I think they have a trial period, so you might be able to experiment. Also, Sprint owns almost half of Clearwire, and what Sprint calls “4G” service is actually Clearwire WiMax, so Sprint’s 4G service is the same thing. If you know somebody who has a 4G Sprint smartphone, you could have them see what kind of “4G” signal they get in your house. That wouldn’t be a perfect test, but if you get a really good signal from a Sprint 4G phone, you can expect you’ll probably get a good signal from a Clear WiMax modem, too. (The converse might not be true, since a phone has a tighter power and space budget than something that plugs into your house current and sits on a table or a windowsill.)

I got it because at the time I had my house on the market (didn’t manage to sell it) and I liked the idea (if I was lucky where I ended up) of being able to take my service with me with no hassle and no downtime.

[decklin.livejournal.com]

I tried it (in Cambridge) and found the latency to be too high to use as my main connection. Bandwidth was reasonable, and it's fine for web surfing, but SSH/VoIP/gaming/anything like that were not great. I did keep the USB stick and a cheaper plan to use when out and about (Cambridge, Somerville, or Boston, coverage seems fine everywhere) -- much more convenient than using my phone as a hotspot, if not all that much faster.

(If you do end up interested in the mobile service, I have an older model of the USB stick that I was planning on putting up on Craigslist that I'd be happy to let go for cheap.)

[geekchik.livejournal.com]

I used their sister service, Clearwire, for about a year when I lived in Ohio from 2007-2008. I was very pleased with the service. The few times that I had a connection issue, I called to inquire and they knocked $20 off my bill. I especially liked that they weren't also trying to sell me cable tv or landline service at the same time.

[geekchik.livejournal.com]

I should note that I was basically using the service for web surfing and music streaming.

[sparr0.livejournal.com]

The connection is great when you've got signal. If you have it in your home it's pretty easy to find a good spot to situate the antenna permanently. If you use the mobile device there's a bit more "move around to find good signal each place you go" than with a cell phone, but similar in how it works.