morgan1112
join:2003-04-07
Round Rock, TX
| Clear Launches Today in Austin, San Antonio and More Cities
Clear soft launched their wireless broadband services today in my market, Austin, Texas along with several other cities that were previously listed as "Coming Soon" on their website. The following 23 cities now have Clear services:
Abilene, TX
Amarillo, TX
Atlanta, GA
Austin, TX
Bellingham, WA
Boise, ID
Charlotte, NC
Chicago, IL
Corpus Christi, TX
Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
Greensboro, NC
Killeen, TX
Las Vegas, NV
Lubbock, TX
Midland/Odessa, TX
Milledgeville, GA
Philadelphia, PA
Portland, OR
Raleigh, NC
Salem, OR
San Antonio, TX
Waco, TX
Wichita Falls, TX
I went into my local Best Buy yesterday where a Clear representative had a booth setup. While he was not selling services yet, he did have a laptop configured using the Motorola Home Modem. SpeedTest.net resulted in approximately 2.3Mbps down, 0.05Mbps up with latency of 534ms and one bar of signal on the modem. PingTest.net gave the connection a rating of "D". With horrible results like that, I don't see how they are going to avoid a significant number of complaints from customers actually trying to use the service. At this point, I would rather stick with my Sprint 3G connection which seems to have better coverage and much more reliable U/D speeds. A 0.05Kbps upload test is pretty bad and no where near the advertised 1Mbps. Just to make sure my eyes where not deceiving me I ran the test 3 more times on different cities with similar results. I'm assuming the 1 out of 5 lit green bars on the top of the Motorola modem indicated a single bar of signal but since I have not read the manual I really don't know. Until I see regular upload speeds at or around 500 Kbps or more I don't think I will recommend the service to anyone. It's important to note, that my Sprint Palm Pre cell phone had a full 5 bars of service inside the Best Buy which tells me that my 3G phone would have likely crushed that 4G modem in an upload speed test. 0.05Kbps per second upload is just simply unacceptable for any broadband service let alone dial up. While reading numerous reviews displaying slow upload speeds I had always assumed the network upload capabilities were saturated. However, now that I see slow uploads before they have even launched their services it seems to indicate that the tower bandwidth is significantly throttled or there is a major configuration problem. If I can pull down more than 2Mbps I should easily be able to push 1Mbps up in the same location and signal strength. I hope this company get's their act together soon so I can sign up someday. |
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p110011
join:2001-12-29
Oregon City, OR | Setting up with 1 bar doesn't seem like very good marketing to me. Here's my test w/5 bars
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morgan1112
join:2003-04-07
Round Rock, TX
| reply to morgan1112
I ran the following Speed Test today while at a BestBuy store in Austin, TX:
As you can see the upload speeds are really really bad. I hope they do something about this soon. Also, I have no idea how they can provide VOIP services with Line Quality results rated at a C. They really need to fix the upload problem or they will continue to recieve negative reviews their customers. |
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stuckpixel
join:2008-07-23
Charlotte, NC | reply to morgan1112
Had it for about a week in Charlotte. Piggybacking on the neighbor before. Happy with it and the price. CSR's have been helpful too.
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quatra
Premium
join:2003-06-22
Matthews, NC
 ·magicjack.com
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to morgan1112
So what's the deal? I see you can get "home" service for $25/month (which just means it uses AC power instead of USB) - and it apparantly is capable of 9mbit down 512kbit up? Sounds like a pretty good deal just add power inverter and you're rolling.
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Is there a contract???
What is the latency like to sites like 4.2.2.1? |
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