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Clear Has Nationwide Outage
An anonymous reader writes "Based on reports from Clear's forum, the WiMax provider has been experiencing a loss of service problem all over the country. The troubled WiMax provider (also known as Clearwire) has had many user complaints of throttling, over billing, overloaded towers and system congestion, and of misrepresentation of the service offerings in ads and by resellers, so this is can't be good news for Clear's management. Reports are scattered among multiple forum threads, but at least one Clear rep was reported by a user to have acknowledged it was a nationwide issue."
I'm posting this using my Clear dongle... no issues though I did have a really poor connection for a day late last week.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
I had a customer calling complaining that VPN was taking longer than usual. Simple tasks like email (well, Lotus Notes isn't that simple I guess) and browsing intranet pages was sluggish at best. Turns out the customer switched from a cable-based service to Clear. Her husband stated that they were saving $20 a month. I told her she's probably spending more than $20 in frustration trying to get work done.
Here's hoping she got her cable internet back.
Karnal
Everything's clear now! Move on!
One could say that the problem is Clear?
Thank you! I'll be here all week!
They don't have enough money to pay for their bandwidth after they send me a piece of junk mail every single day.
I've had there service for about 3 months now and not a single problem. Sometimes I might get a slight drop in speed due to signal issues.
Comeing from Cricket's "Broadband" Service thou I expect anything to be better.
My experience with Clear has been pretty positive overall, mainly because comcast made my experience so negative, anything would be a step in the right direction. .5mbps down, 1mbps up. It is impossible to stream tv shows. There would be times when nothing would connect for a few hours.
My only complaint is periodically my connection will drop to
The only reason I went with Clear is because Comcast claimed I live in an "illegal apartment" (their words, not mine) and would not provide me service. I've called during those times, the tech people waste my time by saying I have great signal (i know that, im 2 blocks from the tower) and then have me plug directly into the modem (after restarting a couple times) and running speed tests and pinging some website. They finally investigated my tower (back in october) and said there was a problem with the tower, it would be fixed in January. Which SUCKS because Im leaving Chicago in just a few days, so, no real benefit for me there.
I wouldn't use them if I could get service, and they have a long way to go before they could be a viable alternative to Cable. As it is, they were a good temporary solution to a problem I was having.
I Can't ride the 720 rapid in LA across the main sections of LA without getting the 4G interrupted multiple times. Same thing on the 2 on the backside from Hollywood to UCLA/Westwood. That being said, i'm a few GB shy of 1 TB downloaded in 3 months, and no throttling.
This is can't be good news!
loss of service problem
I sure am glad that they got rid of that service problem.
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...for a completely unrelated reason. Realistically I had no problems at all with their service. I had a 4g/3g autoswitching hotspot thingy and regularly got 3-10 mbit transfers. Latency was a wholly different issue... Sure, it was fast once it started, but that seemed to be much slower... traceroutes to my house with clear seemingly went around the globe which neither AT&T nor Verizon did... customer service was always very nice and helpful, no billing issues or other woes some other reported. My only issue was latency which made an RDP/VNC session virtually useless...
They really do suck.
Drive them into bankruptcy the same way we did to Circuit Shitty.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Another blatantly false headline from /. This is getting old quickly.
This seems like pretty irresponsible reporting, so far as I can tell. What? A forum post on Clear's support forums had a few comments, and BAM! Front page of Slashdot. Pure awesome. Duh, guys.
---- Please flame below this line ----
If you live in an oversold area, it's apparently awful - but I don't. I regularly get 10mbps downstream, 1mbps upstream. I do a ton of bittorrent downloading and also watch a lot of streaming video through Hulu and Netflix, and I've yet to be throttled. It's also working right now, obviously, although earlier today I was having some trouble getting certain web pages to load - not sure if that was due to this, or something else. Clear isn't perfect, but so far it's better than my old Verizon DSL (the copper line to my house had some issue that Verizon simply refused to fix, which required me to manually reboot my modem as much as four or five times a day to maintain service), and yes, it's $20 a month cheaper than cable.
Check out Treesandthings.com for offbeat news
And it's already been plummetting.
From their support rep Sheldon: It is recommended that you contact us by phone at 1-888-888-3113 or chat via www.clear.com.
If the customer doesn't have internet access, how the hell do you expect them to chat the internet???
I've had very few issues with Clear. In fact, I prefer them as an ISP over Qwest or Comcast. But, my wife ordered the better Qwest DSL recently, so we're using Qwest as a primary and Clear as our secondary network. Currently, Clear is plugged into our Wii.
-If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well.
Are you kidding me? Do some more research before you post trash talk and call it news...
I used to work on their now-defunct billing and back-office management system.
Their production system actually had an error code someone had put in as a test code, entitled "The towah is on FIYA!"
If you had service from them about 4 years ago, I'm probably the reason you were over-billed. Damn, I'm glad I'm out of there.
There seems to be a majority of the reports from the East and North East. While we're enjoying sun and 40 degrees in the Midwest, I've read that there may be some snow back East. We could assume that there's some connection between snow, ice, bad weather, power outages and possible network problems.
Just sayin...
I use it every day, no different here than usual, a relatively mediocre 5mbps down, 1mbps up.
They've struggled to get additional financing to continue to build out their system. However, once they do, these guys are poised to give cable operators some competition in otherwise closed markets. No wonder, that the cable companies are spreading as many rumors as possible and pressuring bankers and financiers to keep them from doing so. If they become competitive and Wi-Max takes off, it could drastically reduce the prices for local cable service.
I had it for quite a few months on my home pipe.. it was *bad*. It was reliable (only went down completely a few times). The speeds would be around 3-6 Mbit down. As soon as you actually use your pipe (xfer more then 8GB) they would knock you down to 0.25 down (which is unusable) Clear might be ok for mobile-only use... but who wants to spend $45 a month for just mobile 4G access? It's too bad Clear's backend sucks so much... WiMAX is awesome technology,
Personally I hate Comcast, but they are a ton better than Clear. I left a couple weeks back because after 3 days of reporting 56k speeds, I was finally told that I had been throttled. What is really bad here, is how they explained to me that the system works. In short, there is no specified cap or limit, instead you are judged by how much data you use on a given tower at a given time. For those who use this at your homes, if you use more data than a passerby or friend of a friend using a dongle on your tower, you are instantly throttled. This can last for an undetermined amount of time. For me it was on day 4 when I finally quit.
Be warned, if you experience slow downs I would wager the farm this is what is happening to you. They like to write it off as "network issues", "tower upgrades", "clouds", "weather", anything but telling you about their network management.
Enjoy Clear.
I checked with a good friend who works at Clear. Not in sales but the core network engineering team. There are no impacts out of the usual. Certainly noting nationwide. What’s with the slander? Will UFO and Elvis sightings be /. Headlines in the near future?
In all fairness, did you check the power adapter for the DSL modem?
I had a similarly difficult problem to troubleshoot. The connection would drop at least that many times a day, if not more. Rebooting the modem seemed to fix it, even if temporary.
The DSL co ran numerous tests on the line, and found nothing wrong. Even hooking it up at the point of entry of the house, before house wiring did not fix the problem. I thought for the longest time, there HAD to be a problem with the line as well.
It turns out, that the STOCK power supplies with the modem, were not strong enough to power the actual modem. Increasing the mA about 15% by using another Power Converter fixed the problem, and it has been 100% since. Getting a new modem would not have solved the problem, as the stock power supply came with every one.
See, I thought this was relevant until I dug in further and discovered that it's probably a different Clear, in a different country,
from the one I use.
You don't own the entire planet yet, you know.
It took my Clear cheese wedge about forty minutes to train up late Wednesday afternoon. That's unusual for the area from which I was connecting. Performance was good (evaluated by my norms for the tower I'm on) once I was on net.
Web pages sure, they loaded, but I couldn't stream a netflix movie over clear, or use my IP phone to work from home either, but I also live in Baltimore city, in a house built in 1900 with double layered bricks. I'm not hating, but when they say there's service I don't mean 1 light of the 5 possible. and there's a tower a quarter mile away.
ymmv but clear customer experience has been excellent for like 18 months, including a corporate shift from xohm to clear, where my equipment was replaced proactively at no cost to me.
i'm in baltimore, which is blanketed in wet snow right now, as much of the east coast. despite clear reps claiming service does not degrade, that has not been my experience. snow storms and snow cover often result in an inability to connect to the network and frequently dropped connections.
This thread reminds me of yesterday's odd item about Obama's speech. Editors on retreat?
I'm on Clear, no issues today or for that matter for many months since hiccups while they did a rolling, live changeover of their system here in Seattle. As to throttling, Clear could do a better job of distributing users among AP sites, as well as explaining that they do not have a bottomless panacea of bandwidth on offer. If you're on a reasonably loaded tower, you won't see any sign of throttling, if you're not so lucky, imagination takes over...
I was one of them and wrote about the experience here. The short version: they don't advertise their bandwidth throttling and don't warn when they do throttle your bandwidth. My roommate and I thought they'd be a useful alternative to conventional ISPs, but they turn out not to be.
Funny thing is that I use Clear as a secondary ISP (In addition to their mobile broadband service) and I've been with them since they were Xohm in Baltimore. I've had pretty decent service from them and can't really complain. Right now we were just blanketed in a layer of snow that made my primary Comcast line crap out so I switched Clear to the primary route and even though it's wireless during bad weather, it's been rock solid even while my Comcast connection has been up and down all day.
Your mileage may vary of course, and it's heavily dependent on geography, but in my experience it's been fairly reliable if slower with higher latency then a more "traditional" wired connection.
Expect to see this more often - see I work at this innovative company which used to be known as Motorola, now known as Motorola Solutions who as a business strategy decided to sell my group to Nokia Siemens and before the deal closed decided to lay off 170 US based (none of the overseas guys touched) workers. We'll be lucky if anyone is left to turn out the lights let alone fix anything.
In what has to be an interesting twist on net neutrality and bandwidth throttling, Netflix has released their numbers for network throughput sorted by ISP. Clearwire comes in dead last out of 16 US ISPs: http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/01/netflix-performance-on-top-isp-networks.html
Wait. Stop scrolling for a sec. O.K. Thanks. - P