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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!
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Don't look now buddy, but your participle is dangling.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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 use it every day, no different here than usual, a relatively mediocre 5mbps down, 1mbps up.
I've been using their network for almost a year and I can state that it works great. I'm in the D.C. area and even with the storm last night my 4G coverage was fine.
I really do wish somebody would look into things before they post them. I wonder if the people responsible are from Verizon or AT&T?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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