f13.net

So after farting around with shittastic ATT for mobile broadband I cancelled and decided to try something new.  Yes, Sprint has been at this 4G thing for a while but recently Google injected a fat wad of cash into their coffers and reformed the corp. into something called "Clear" under the Clearwire ISP.  

So yah, I'm sitting here in Maryland downloading at 4Mb/s uploading at 1Mb/s, and getting 85ms ping... all rocksteady.  If I leave the confines of the Microwave tower's radius it just switches to 3G (havent tested it yet though).  Indications are though that congestion is minimal, unlike a provider like ATT.  3G coverage is pretty much the same as Sprints, but the 4G will be expanded beyond Sprint's prior capability.  They're aiming for every major U.S. city by the end of the year.

What'd it cost you say?  For the 4g/3g mobile usb, including the equipment lease it'll be $55/month, with no additional fees or taxes.  There's also no activation fee.  If you break the contract you're only liable for the equipment, which is like $125.  You're also not charged a restock fee if you cancel within 14 days along with not being liable for the contract.  The generic 4g card is only $40/month and if you get multiple devices the price breaks even more.

Also, the connection manager is very slick and simple.  Also very quick, with the capability of monitoring total usage and looking into your acct.   Live support chat is included, email, and a bunch of other stuff.   Overall, I'm extremely impressed with it and will be getting the 4g/3g base station so I can hotspot the boat I run, or my car, or my house for that matter.

Is the coverage area as robust as ATT or Verizon???  No.  But, for people who only worry about coverage in populated areas it's definitely the biggest bang for the buck.  And since it's relatively obscure, the network is underpopulated and spritely.

The coverage looks pretty thin, still, unfortunately.

http://www.clear.com/coverage

I've been selling this stuff since Clearwire first came into my city three years back.  At the time it was:

"Look, it's wireless internet!  It's the wave of the future!"
"Dude, it's bad DSL speed and you're charging sixty bucks a month for it."
"WAVE OF THE FUTURE!"

Well, the price came down and the speed shot up, so they've finally reached the point where they're competitive with the big boys.  But bear in mind, they still don't hold a candle to fiber; it's not the home internet choice of the 1337.  I've seen their 4g speeds as low as 2.4 megabits and as high as 8.7 in some spots too, so your actual speed with their service can fluctuate and is often out of your control.  But that aside, their portable hotspots are insanely awesome toys.  Sprint's been selling them for a while now (Sprint's 4G and Clear's wimax are the same, right down to the same hardware for some devices), so if you are using a 4G Evo on Sprint, you're already using this service.  You can choose 4G only, which costs less but leaves you high and dry if you're outside the small 4G areas, or 4G+ which drops to Sprint's 3G if you're not in a 4G area.  3G sucks, no surprise, and you're capped at 5 gigabytes on it, but it beats no connection at all.  4G has no data cap.

Pricewise this service is way cheaper than ATT/Verizon 3G, less congested (meaning you can actually USE the fuckin thing), and wicked fast in 4G areas.   It's also the ONLY wireless ISP to offer a hotspot/router (for the same $40-$55 per month btw).  And dont forget they're now leveraged with Google's money now.  These are powerful statements and I'm actually considering a distributorship for my industy because of them.

The ability to stick the base station in your boat or car and give net to everyone in the vehicle is a powerful capability, especially if you use the same station for your home internet.  Sure, I could cobble together my own hotspot if I wanted with most any mobile broadband, but this solution is much simpler.

Obviously the UI and custserv are different than Sprint's (the custserv is robot-jesus btw).  But my question now is if the hardware on their side is the same also.  They may share the same towers and the same enduser equipment, but is my data passing through Sprint's stations/routers??

Kitsune, what's involved in becoming a distributor??

Yeah, if someone has one of those old shitty 3G USB dongles for their laptop, these new toys blow them out of the water, no question.  And it's a little cheaper on top of being way better.  I carry around one of the mobile hotspots instead of the USB thing, because it feeds my laptop, my ipod, and my phone, without cables.  Downside being fairly short battery life of three-ish hours on a charge, but I can always charge the thing off my car or laptop if worse comes to worst.

Ghambit, I have to admit, I'm not entirely sure how to become a dealer.  They showed up at my office asking me to sell their stuff, so I just signed the forms and that was that.  The person you want to get a hold of is the indirect sales manager for your city, that's the title of the person who deals with non-Clear-employee sales people.  The commissions for sales are pretty good; a living can be made off of selling their stuff if you're willing to go all door to door salesman with it.

Portable hotspot without the 5G cap sounds enticing but presently I have a day-to-day existence in a WiFi cloud.

I hear lots kibitz that 5G cap isn't much but if you start streaming movies and video, you can eclipse that mark rather quickly.

Now if the cost was 50% of the rate Cox is charging me for home internet service (which is fairly reliable and ~3-6M connection), and it would be a reason to switch, but consistency in bandwidth, with all the connected devices in the house, is most essential.

Rooting for them and anyone else to grant more options.

And I hear that Verizon is not actively rolling out its FiOS any longer — is this true?

I have heard some rumors that they are under a lot of pressure from Vodafone to start making some return on the already sunk costs of their FIOS investments before they put more money down on it. I am pretty sure that after the sell-off of a huge swath of their copper wireline business (phone and DSL) to Frontier, they probably don't have very many areas that are "Verizon country" to roll FIOS out to now.

Verizon's currently building up their own 4G network to supplement their 3G.  But, word is they're a ways off from implementing it.  So for the time being this is it.

Once Clear goes live down south I think I'll dump U-verse and get the home base station + on-the-go + voice and 3G coverage all for $90/month.  The home station is unlimited download speeds, but I'm sure it's throttled.  Though the 1Mb/sec upload is still better than even ATT's fiber.  Altogether MUCH cheaper than Uverse + 3G card.

I know 2 people in Austin that use clear and they both love it.  Personally my tethered droid is enough for my uses of the laptop on the road, but if these guys had been in the area back when I was considering dumping cable I would have moved over.  Since the new TV I am not quite as pissed at cable as I was (even with the crappy new channel guide).

Northland is rolling the fiber in central NY right now. A few months back they showed up and installed a drop to the library. The administration was confused, asked me if I knew what was up, I didn't. Asked the techs and they said "We were rolling it down the street so we decided to install a drop for you." We're on a state highway, they're not putting it anywhere else in town.

I live a few blocks off said highway but they wouldn't roll it over there for me  :oh_i_see:

The best part of the map, to me, is how there is a literal circle of no-coverage around my house that eclipses the overall metro-Atlanta coverage.  I live in the Mos Eisley of Georgia.

In re. 4G, You have to be careful when using that map because it's fairly high resolution.  For instance, my zip code "isnt covered" but upon zooming the map close enough to see National Harbor Marina I found out they actually covered JUST this complex while the majority of the near environs was a dead zone.   Also, typically coverage maps lag well behind actual coverage areas... so the best way imo is just to buy the thing at no risk to yourself and just try it out.  You have 14 days to return it and if you decide to keep it and/or upgrade they'll overnight you the newhardware free of charge.

They cover Chowchilla, Los Banos, and freaking Visalia, but not Silicon Valley? Really?  :uhrr:

Shit, man. We barely get 3G here. The Hoth of NY.

No, really.  However, you are correct that if you zoom in, you can find some very odd green zones.  For example, the closest one to my house is in the middle of a lake.  It doesn't even cover the whole lake.  I find the map to be suspicious.


I think we live in rather similar areas.  If you hear an explosion, do you immediately assume it was a meth lab?  Are you usually right?

Yeah, the map is kinda crap.  The only way to be a hundred percent certain is to actually have a clear device at the location and see what kind of reception it reports.  I've seen people in a dead zone on the map getting good signal, and I've seen someone in the middle of a coverage area have a shitty signal that wouldn't work unless the modem was set in a high window and aligned just so.

There's a one-week return window, so if they let you sign up (theoretically the site checks your address and won't let a salesman sign anyone up who's not in a service area) and the thing doesn't work, you shouldn't get any hassle when you cancel.

Additionally, if you need a static IP, which is a feature of the business-class rather than home, you need to emphasize the fact repeatedly if you're dealing direct with clear's customer service reps.  Every order I've given them for business service, they've fucked up and assigned a home plan.  Then I get to call them back and waste time to have them reconfigure the account to match the plain English specifications that had previously been given.  Which is fun.

So, I just upgraded again, to their Clear Spot 4g+ & mobile.  So I'll have shareable 3g/4g on the boat (which fuckin rocks) and mobile 3g/4g.  My question is, how do I share my usb mobile card at home?  Is there a router I can buy that'll handle this?  Do I run it through my PC first and then some wireless access point?  'splain please.  Never setup a network like this before.

Windows Connection Sharing would probably work.

Or you could just buy a 4g hotspot/femtocell from Clear.

I just used WCS as normal with a crossover cable and voila.  Shared internet. 

How's this service fairing for you folks now that you've had it for a while?
I'm looking at this service but slightly hesitant as there seem to be a fair amount of complaints of service degrading over time. I think I'll just pay the modem and setup fee so I can skip the 2 year commitment, then I can bail with minor loss at any time.

I was looking into them to replace my DSL service, but there are a LOT of complaints of a fairly low bandwidth cap and throttling the hell out of your connection once you exceed it.   

Like JWIV, I am desperately waiting for wireless to reach the ubiquitous stage and cover my Rural area.

My DSL sets the bar shockingly low (512k), so would 3G (which appears to cover me in the Shenandoah Valley) reliably put me past 1MB speeds (I can't seem to find hard specs other than 3x faster or 77% better)?

A dual purpose portable 3G/4G would be nifty, as I travel a bit too.  This is all foreign to me... so any thoughts or pointers would be appreciated.

Their 3G coverage is much wider than my ATT smartphone coverage.  So those who are traveling, rest assured.  Hell, I was in BFE outer banks Carolinas and had Clear 3G, whilst my att phone was stuck on Edge/gprs.
As for 4G coverage, looks like it's gotten as far south as St. Augustine, FL (I had 4G there even though it's not on the map) and has stopped there for now.  Hopefully by the end of the year it'll reach the Fla Keys.

Throttling or not, speedwise and pingwise 4G vastly outperforms 3G; my speed usually hovered between 3 and 5 megs.  With 3G you're lucky to get 1.5 and pings below 200.

All this being said... there ARE other small ISPs offering WiMax, so shop around.  I know in SoFla there's already a local wimax provider, but they only service that area - so if you leave it you're screwed, plus they have to lease 3G from providers like Sprint.  But for some folk in rural america that may be the only solution.  Clear is still primarily an east coast thing derived in D.C.  But once it gets south I do plan on selling and installing boxes for the boating community.

Well since I've found out there are is no cable or DSL service to my new place, I went ahead and ordered the home setup. The map shows my property mostly in the green "best" area, so I hopefully will get decent service. House is on the highest point of the property, not that I have any clue if that helps.

That said, I'm actually impressed with what I'm squeezing out of my ATT air card that work provides. Speedtest.net shows me at 2.5 down / 1.0 up, that's with 4 bars 3g. It's not cable but it's certainly better than dialup.

Next decision is Directv or Dish Network for the tube  :uhrr:

DirecTV, duh.

FYI those in SoFla area, they flipped the switch on 4G a minute ago.

And the pacemakers and defibrillators go wild....

Oh so quick update. I went ahead and paid the up front costs for the modem and setup so I could just do the month to month plan and I'm impressed with the speeds I get from this. Now, I read quite a bit about how they "manage" their connections and will throttle you if you stream a lot, so I'm giving up the streaming for now. I don't want to ruin a good thing and I'm getting a solid 5.5meg down / 1 meg up on speedtest.net with pings around 120ms to default picked test sites. I currently cannot get cable or dsl, so it's this, dial-up or sattelite and for 45 bucks/month this wins.

I'm not entirely happy about having to give up all the streaming and extreme amounts of digital content I was downloading, but we wanted a horse farm in the sticks so I guess something had to give. I'm not sure I'd attempt to replace cable or dsl with this, but when options are limited this came out to be a pretty solid choice for now.

So, Clear added Los Angeles today so I excitedly went to their site and I'm basically on a headland of "future coverage" (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40252/clear-headland.jpg).  Verizon says I'm in their area, but they don't seem to have a modem option right now, only USB sticks, so that's a non-starter.

:heartbreak:

I've been 10-15 miles outside the coverage zone for as long as I've known about it. :(

So, we figured we'd give it a go with the two week trial and see how it worked.  We ordered it Sunday morning and it came in this morning.  Quite good since the "two weeks" started from Sunday :oh_i_see:.

Getting four bars when I should be out of the coverage area was a welcome surprise but after doing an initial speed test I was less than impressed at 1.5Mbit/.5Mbit which is a little better than my crap DSL to the same test server, but not by much.

Doing actual downloads though (GTA4 from D2D), I'm getting 4+ MBit/s so, uh... yay?  Definitely looking to put it through its paces streaming and uploading to my web server over the next week, but as of now I'm really glad I decided to take them up on their free trial.

Any wireless technology is not going to be the robot jesus super-speed "I can get rid of my comcast because it is twice as fast" thing. Not at the price point people are willing to spend.

Wireless in general (even on dedicated licensed spectrum) has a number of factors which will lead to it being a less cost effective per-megabit internet option when you have access to either of the usual 2 wireline options (cable or DSL) available.

I may actually have to switch to a directional microwave wi-max solution as opposed to Clear's omni-based stuff.  Turns out the location I just moved the boat to is smack right in a small deadzone.   :oh_i_see:
Pricing is about the same as Clear for the local provider and is actually a lot faster if you pay a few extra bucks.  Granted, we're talking about a 12 inch microwave dish pointed at their tower to pull this off.  A mobile solution this is not.

A few days in now and I'm looking at keeping it.  Yeah, the upload speed sucks (.5 mbit/s) and IP geolocation puts me in Jacksonville now but going to 8 mbit/s down from the 1-1.5 mbit/s I was getting with Earthlink/AT&T is dramatic to say the least.

Overall it comes out to $51 which is about $10 more than we were paying for DSL until recently and about the same as Time Warner wanted to charge with the added benefit of not having to deal with Time Warner.  I imagine the speed will come down as more people get on 4G but unless it's really bad, this will be a good alternative to slow and getting-kicked-in-the-sack.

I'm necroing this because Clear pulled the proverbial fast one, just like most telecoms seem to do. 

a)  they closed all of their U.S. based support centers, you now talk with an illiterate Indian for "tech support"
b)  they're now in bed with ACN, which is today's latest pyramid scam
c)  they've lost/cancelled all of their retail store contracts
d)  they've cancelled their 3G dataplans and 3G enabled hardware (so no backup connection if you're not in 4g-land)
d)  their stock was junk a little while ago
e)  they got assfucked by Sprint, which now owns 48%+ of the stock and a competing product after bailing them out of bankruptcy
f)   they plan on dumping WiMax for LTE if they can get their funding in order (kind of a good thing I guess depending on how they roll out)

Overall, a steaming pile for Google.  Dying ever so slowly.
If you're still interested in the tech, I'd probably just go Sprint.

Stop jumping on new tech service bandwagons.  There really is very little benefit as a consumer to be an early adopter, unless you have no problem of going through the hassle of looking for a new provider while dealing with your old provider self-destructing as they don't hit the forecasts they need for their next round of financing.

We still have XO Communications fiber in our building.  :why_so_serious:

About the only reason I have not to switch to Sprint is that I've got a grandfathered true unlimited contract with Verizon, and they have a much wider coverage area.

--Dave

This sucks for me because they were, a year ago, my only option for anything close to broadband at my home. Their service over this past year has become rock solid, though it was shaky at first for me. I download from Steam at great speeds and stream Netflix and other services in full HD with rarely a hiccup.

I suppose if the service dies, I'll have to switch to Verizon who no longer offers unlimited 4g with new contracts as far as I understand. Verizon's performance is also not close to what I get from Clear currently in the area I want it (my house). Who knows, maybe this will be give Comcast incentive enough to stretch the service 1 more mile to get me covered, which is how far away they say I am.

Rumor has it that you can actually get the old unlimited data on VZW again.  If you call CS and request to add the mobile hotspot service to your plan (for $20 or $30/mo extra), if automatically puts you on unlimited data.  Reports from people thus far are that cancelling the hotspot after it starts showing on their accounts leaves the $29.99 unlimited data in place.  Hotspot fee is pro-rated if you cancel, so if you cancel in 3 days, you'll only be charged $3 for it, but be on unlimited data @ 29.99 forever.

I'm already grandfathered on my phone, but we just got a Xoom tablet for my mom for christmas, so I'll be trying this trick on that here shortly to see if it does actually work.

Interesting, please let me know how it works out when you give this a try. I'm not going to jump ship unless or until I experience degradation of service.

No luck on the Xoom, and I've already got unlimited data on my phone plan (grandfathered), but there are a ton of reports of this working on slickdeals.  Apparently the trick is to make sure they put the wifi hotspot as a separate line item - tell them that work is reimbursing you for it and you need it billed separately.  When you cancel the hotspot a day or two later, it leaves the data untouched and you're now on a grandfathered plan.