Beware, this company/service is a joke! I was sick & tired of my AT&T DSL service for home. Even though I was paying for the Elite plan which was supposed to be 6 MBPS, I was getting less that 1 MBPS! Called AT&T customer service several times, everytime same story... They tell me that they will open a case and have someone look into it. After a while the internet speed goes up a bit to about 2 to 3 Mbps and after couple of days again slows down to a crawl! Finally decided to cut them off. I was looking around for another ISP without any contracts and found Clear... I knew they were a new company with new technology (WIMAX 4G), so decided to take a chance. Here is the complete story: - Looked up their website to check coverage for my home address to make sure that I was covered for 4G. Talked to customer service and signed up for their "Take One: Home" unlimited plan with month to month (no contracts). The price was good...$45 plus $5 modem lease fee for 6 Mbps speed. - Shipping was prompt and setup was easy. I am a software engineer... So no problems with setup. - Made sure that the Motorola Modem was placed close to the window in the right direction of the tower to get best possible signal... 4 out of 5 bars. - At first everything was good. The speed was consistent at 3 to 4.5 Mbps. I was actually checking the speed on independent DSL speed test websites to make sure. - Downloaded 2 to 3 movies for my 4 year old girl, wife was also was watching Net Flix on Nintendo WII... Streaming movies etc. I also have Vonage VOIP phone running on Internet. - After about 10 days... The speed went down drastically. My wife called me from home when I was at work and said that she is not able to even watch videos on Youtube! So I get home and check the speed, sure enough, it had dropped down to 0.5 mbps! - I called Customer service Techies, they take me through the drill, switch off modem, power it back on and check the speed. Even though I knew this would not help (because I had already tried that before calling customer service), just went along with it for the fun of it. As expected, it did not help. I asked the Technical support guy, what was the problem? He tried to give me excuses, asked me if I was downloading lot of stuff! I said, off course... That was the whole purpose of taking their Unlimited usage plan! That shut him up. He put me on hold to see if there was a tower outage... Ha ha. No outage... Now what? I started pushing the guy real hard, and at last he admitted that there was a Network Congestion issue! Bulls eye. For all the ordinary people out there, what this means is: Clear does not have sufficient Network Infrastructure/capacity and bandwidth to support their customers! So I asked customer service, how long will it take for them to fix the issue. He was like, I don't know there is nothing to fix. What! Afterwards he reluctantly told me, couple of hours or maybe a day. So here I was supposed to sit & wait indefinitely and hope that some users would jump off so that I can surf the internet with some reasonable speed. I told them I will be cancelling their lousy service... The customer rep actually apologized to me. I told him, it was OK, as it was not his fault... He is just sitting in a far away country (Read outsourced to India!) and really cannot help in this situation. The bottom line is... You may want to try Clear for mobile internet access (even though they have very limited coverage area). But never buy their service for home/office, as they are not capable of delivering the service speeds which they advertise. I live in Chicago suburbs and wanted to warn everybody out there about CLEAR WiMAX Broadband Service for Home.
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