Foo - Clear for Internet?

Just wondering if anyone is using Clear's wireless ISP service, and what their opinion of it is. I have been thinking of recommending it to a relative, because all it takes is one Wi-Max to Wi-Fi access point and perhaps a repeater or two, and that covers a house without having to pull wires.

I know it probably has nasty latency (100ms or so), but supposedly it is being worked on, and the bandwidth is good. Anyone have experience with it?

Why not just go with regular ISP and get a wireless router?

Heh 100ms, I used to play FPS games with 300-500. lol

Just wondering if anyone is using Clear's wireless ISP service, and what their opinion of it is. I have been thinking of recommending it to a relative, because all it takes is one Wi-Max to Wi-Fi access point and perhaps a repeater or two, and that covers a house without having to pull wires.

I know it probably has nasty latency (100ms or so), but supposedly it is being worked on, and the bandwidth is good. Anyone have experience with it?

Times are changing. I used to be able to find tons of unsecured wireless networks, but I've been paying for my own for the last couple years. I just moved into a new apartment, however, and there happened to be one with good signal strength.

Anyways, a tracert shows this mysteriously careless or generous neighbor has Clear.

Speeds are decent. Speedtest.net says 1 Mbps. I'd say a couple hundred kbps is typical. I generally have to preload videos a little more than I did with Qwest 1.5 Mbps DSL.

Latency is poor, however. Skype is almost unusable because of it, and multiplayer gaming is very difficult. I get 100ms when I'm lucky, but 200ms is typical. Sometimes the latency reaches double that for easily observable periods, but it appears also have frequent, very short bursts of 300+ ms route times. I think it's these short, frequent bursts of even higher ping that make Skype so bad on Clear. Speech gets garbled and there's often an unnatural delay between talking and getting a response.

So I'd say it's great a great deal ($25/month, I think) for browsing and low definition Youtube, especially if you're a mobile laptop type of person, but not for gaming, VoIP, or high definition videos.

It's not what I'm looking for, though. I'm currently trying to decide between basic Verizon at $30/month and Comcast at $50/month.

Um, I'm using Clear and I have very mixed results. It is convenient and cheap, but in my case it isn't exactly fast. This is a test I just did a couple of seconds ago. It is one of the faster results I've gotten recently:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/741028861.png (http://www.speedtest.net)

Here's one I did a couple days ago:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/738773685.png (http://www.speedtest.net)

Some people have posted very good results, but that's just not happening in my case.

I've tried it. There is a lot that is impractical with Clear, like Skype, Remote Desktop / Terminal Services and rich web applications. The latency is just awful, and it's not any faster than my 2G EDGE data access (take with the caveat that I'm on AT&T and have to share the network with a bunch of iDiots) .

With Clear's recent upgrades in service, I'm getting no problems with high bandwidth programs. I run Skype with video and don't have any lag issues on sound or jittery video. I stream Netflix movies without encountering any buffering issues... I've had 2 different 'flix streams running on separate computers without buffering problems. I don't do any online gaming, so I can't speak to that capacity, but it's been just fine for everything else.

All I know about clear is the constant polls asking me if I've heard of them.

With Clear's recent upgrades in service, I'm getting no problems with high bandwidth programs.

Interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if not all areas are supported equally as far as upgrades and backbone capacity. It makes sense for example, that they'd be more interested in having the latest and greatest to appeal to prospective customers in Redmond, with its high percentage of computer industry employees, compared to where I am in Lynnwood, which seems to be have a higher proportion of blue collar and service industry folks who would tend to be less able to afford or feel a need for WiMax.

I was surprised, however, that I was able to watch an episode of Lost on Netflix last night with no buffering interruptions.

Mysterious neighbor's Clear modem dropped the connection the night before, however. Fortunately, it still had its default password, so I rebooted it for him and the problem went away. Free, unprompted tech support. He'll be on his own when my DSL gets hooked up this week. He's lucky I'm not malicious.