Well, it seems my story is the same as many others who have complained about ClearWire (aka 'Clear').
I've been subscribed to Clear ISP since November 3. I found out about ClearWire from one of those mass mailers everybody gets and the thing that stood out to me was the $34.99 price point which I thought wasn't bad, especially for speeds upto 6mbps.
So, I called the 1-800 number and talked to a rep. About the advertised price on the mailer, and she quickly went into what I like to call typical call center premeditated sales mode. She eventually gets around to asking me if I would be doing any gaming or HD streaming video viewing, I tell her yes and she then recommends that I go with the higher speed capacity which is $49.99. Needless to say I ordered the service, got it in the mail, set it up and I was good to go.
The first day I used it it was awesome. I went to speedtest.net to see what speed I was actually getting and I was averaging around 3.5mbps download/1.0mbps upload, which is about what I expected, that was the first week. The 2nd week I noticed my NetFlix connection would keep pausing, same thing with YouTube video's. So of course I tested my speed again and I couldn't believe it had gone all the way down to as low as. 39mbps to. 90mbps! Some times I may get 1.0 but thats off peak hours.
After a week of the noticably slower speeds, I call customer service and just my luck, it was a hard to understand non american accent directing me thru what I had already done before I made the call. I did all the unplugging and rebooting and repositioning of the modem AGAIN as the rep wanted me to. I told the rep that my tower signal has always been strong with a consistent five bars lit on the modem so, that wasn't the problem. She then tells me that it's probably heavy congestive traffic on the tower my modem receives it's signal from and that I should try moving the modem to a different part of the house to see if my modem could catch a different towers' signal that wasn't as congested with user traffic. I tried several locations with the same results.
Well, after all that, the one thing I remember ditinctly is at the end of my conversation with the cutomer service rep is her saying to me "if that doesn't work then I dont know what to tell you" and THEN she she says "is there anything else I can help you with today?" After ending the call I just sat there thinking, "thats it?" ok. Now here I am today a month later with the same slow speeds, feeling ripped off and lied to. I say lied to because the sales rep told me that I would never have to worry about peak hours and that my connection speeds would always be consistent. THAT was was a blatant lie because now that I have read their terms of use in small print it, does in fact state in legal terms ofcourse that ClearWire can and will limit and cap you to a certain amount of data usage if THEY determine any over usage of download data. But they never tell you what counts as over usage, and the reason is throttling.
They won't admit to it but it's exactly what they're doing.
About to go with Charter ISP and recommend that no one ever touch ClearWire, in my opinion they don't deliver what they advertise.
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