Switch to Clearwire?

August 11, 2006 2:09 PM

Does anyone have experience with ClearWire?

I would like to replace Comcast if at all possible; their service has always been bad and lately it's been abysmal.

I'm wondering how clearwire compares to cable-based wireless in terms of connectivity, speed, etc. We have a large house currently operating on one Comcast residential line. Our options are basically to expand to two Comcast lines, and deal with all the problems we've had with them already, or to switch to something like Clearwire.

posted by Yelling At Nothing to Technology (3 answers total)

I can't speak to what the service is like in your neck of the woods, but I tried them and wasn't very impressed. The speeds were a third of what was quoted, and the reliability was not that great (resetting the modem/ap 2 times a week). That said, if you use your net connection for stuff like MeFi and email, Clearwire is okay, provided you place the modem in a room where there is a window in the general direction of the tower. If you game, do torrents or anything that even *remotely* taxes your internet connection, you will be dissapointed by the service. The price (around here) is nice, though.
posted by richter_x at 4:39 PM on August 11, 2006

Here in Jacksonville, the terrain is flat, there is a limited shadow of downtown high-rise, and the cable system here had a locally terrible reputation for years under AT&T, until being taken over by Comcast, some years ago. You might say it is a market made for Clearwire. I was fascinated with WiMax when I moved here in 2004, and I tried Clearwire for a couple of months, because it was heavily promoted, and available at my home location. Overall, the 512/128 bandwidth package I got wasn't at all impressive, primarily due, I think to slow DNS resolution (typically, 2 to 5 seconds at peak times, with frequent periods when DNS was just hosed), and backhauling traffic to distant corporate peering points, etc. In other words, the problems appeared to be as much with the design and operation of the network serving the wireless layer, as they did with the wireless layer itself.

I never tried the 1.5/256 level services, because the DNS and backing network issues were so profound (28+ hops to Google's front page, most times) at the time I was trying it, that it made no sense to continue the effort, and I switched to Comcast cable modem service for my home network, which is not without it's problems, either. I'm still looking for a reliable ISP here in the Jacksonville area, and note that Clearwire has continued to fight it out at the bottom end of the pricing curve for new subscribers. They still advertise and promote locally, and I do hope they'll make it economically, long enough for the utility of real WiMax networks to become obvious.
posted by paulsc at 6:33 PM on August 11, 2006

I have some friends in the central California valley, and they have been pretty happy with it. But both of them have mentioned that on occasion, things seem to be completely dead or just really slow. No particular time of day, just seemingly at random. Otherwise, they're happy because their only other options are dialup.
posted by drstein at 12:56 PM on August 14, 2006