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Clearwire Sued Over WiMAX Throttling
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica:
"Wireless operator Clearwire has had a bumpy few months, and now things are getting worse. A lawsuit has been filed by 15 users over the company's throttling practices, accusing Clearwire of not delivering advertised 'high-speed Internet' services to customers and charging them termination fees when they walk away unsatisfied. The complaint focuses heavily on Clearwire's advertising, which not only highlights the speed of the connection, but also the fact that there are no limits on data usage. 'Usage is unlimited — believe it. You can upload, download, and surf as much as you want for one low price with any of the CLEAR Internet plans. We don't slow down your connection — the way some Internet providers do — if we think you are using too much bandwidth,' the complaint quotes from Clearwire's website. (That text appears to have been removed at the time of publication)."
deceptive advertising, DESPITE they have advertised that they were not doing deceptive advertising.
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Who could ever have expected that a wireless(and thus inherently shared-medium, with some partial exceptions from clever antenna shaping and stuff) ISP would be even worse than the wireline ones about bandwidth throttling and general dickishness? I, for one, am shocked.
Doesn't Sprint share the Clear services for their WiMax capabilities? I can attest to the lack of bandwidth restrictions (on 4G at least) by 193GB usage since November!
We really need a federal law that defines "unlimited broadband internet." Throttling me down to dial-up speeds past 5 gigabytes per month is not unlimited broadband. Hell, anything under 3mbps shouldnt even be called broadband.
The DSL reports forums about Clear are horrific. I was thinking of using them for a remote office's backup line, but absolutely no way now. Random throttling to 256k for day or weeks on end is not acceptable.
I feel if they had a decent business level service and priced it accordingly they could really break into the business market. Instead, the "business" package they sell is just a static IP and the same horrible throttling policies.
these are the same people who plastered the lot where I park at work with bright green fliers advertising their service, that should tip people off to the type of company they are.
Unless you're a chinese restaurant or a pizza joint, if you have to advertise by putting fliers on people's cars, you're not a real business.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Anyone consider that some of the alleged "throttling" may bedue to service provider infrastructure that's overloaded to the point where the performance isn't good anymore?
The single biggest issue was that residents, especially those in cities around me in Dakota County, Minnesota, were unwilling to permit the antennas to be placed where Clearwire wanted them.
Clearwire planned to place the 125 foot tower in a city park and residents surrounding the park became motivated and forced the city to deny the request.
Kinda hard for them to provide the speeds they want to their customers when residents won't allow the infrastructure to be built out as the ISP originally planned.
Sucks for all involved regardless of your place in it.
I'm all for going after ClearWire. Hold them to their claims. At the same time, at what point does consumer responsibility come into play. With a tiny bit of critical analysis it is obvious that their claim is complete BS. They can't possibly deliver on it. It's akin to the snake oil salesmen of bygone days. To some degree, stupid people will lose their money to charlatans no matter what laws are in place. That said, don't expect the Government to do much in this case. ICO (Clearwire) is so deeply in bed with the current administration that any real action against them is highly unlikely.
Remember some time ago when Obama decided to delay the Digital TV cut over, and the FCC stepped in to stop it? Remember that Mr. Salemme, head of Clearwire, who had a VERY vested interest in seeing DTV delayed had both been a contributor to Obama's campaign AND just joined his "Transition Team" as a (you guessed it) technology adviser on the DTV cut over? Well, he got his way...but the plot thickens. See, Mr. Salemme is but one player. Craig McCaw, owner of ICO (ICO owns Clearwire and another interest with the same intention which Mr. Salemme was also executive director of) is also a player. Seems he maxed his donations to Mr. Obama and was an "advisor" on the DTV delay. Why does it matter? For several reasons:
1. ICO (Clearwire) was waaaaaaay behind their competition in roll-out readiness. Others were slated to go live with solutions that made use of the vacated spectrum Feb 17th of last year. They are ICO's competition. They had HUGE investments and were ready to go...but had to sit twiddling their thumbs, sitting on their enormous investments and spending more on re-planning their roll-out.
2. TV broadcaster incurred huge costs too. PBS for instance has stated that the delay cost them 22 million. That 22 million has to be covered from somewhere. Let's see, where will that 22 million come from for the PUBLIC broadcasting system? Yeah, you guessed it. The Fed covered it for them with taxpayer dollars.
3. Salemme was sure to point out that he was divested from ICO and Clearwire when he joined Obama's team. Who does he work for? Only a little interest in "Eagle River Investments". Who does ERI invest in? No one...except ICO and Clearwire.
So, in comparison with their past actions, this current matter is laughable. Good luck to those 15 complainants.
Maybe not a law, but a regulation or some other clarification.
I haven't heard of any retail internet connection that is "unlimited".
Bandwidth limits are common
-Maybe removed for "unlimited" plans, or they still have an "excessive use" clause
Usage agreements typically ban servers, often ban anything obscene, pornographic, offensive etc.
- Almost every opinion, and many facts are offensive to someone.
Some ports are often blocked.
certain traffic may be throttled.
Other traffic may be blocked.
I'd like actually unlimited access, no blocked ports/protocols etc, no "acceptable use" limits, no throttling, no "offensive" content rules.
Good luck seeing this anytime soon.
I used Clearwire for a little over a year, and dropped them due to their throttling.
Cool story bro time:
Working from home for an enterprise software company, and moving to a rural area with no real broadband other than Clearwire, I went to their store/office to sign up. Since I was using it primarily for work, I worked with a sales manager who specialized in business accounts. After making it clear what I would be using the access for, including the data volumes I would be using, I was assured that the speed and access I needed would be no problem. I even made it clear that my company used VOIP. I was even given a loaner modem, so I could test the service. After about a week of testing, I decided to sign up, putting the recurring charges on my corporate AMEX.
About three or four months of everything working swimmingly, I was on a call one day, when the phone just stopped working. I had a hardware VOIP device, so I could see the LEDs weren't working, but my other Internet access was fine. I called our VOIP support, and they figured out that the port for VOIP had been blocked.
I called the Clearwire sales guy who I had worked with--and who had assured me that VOIP would not be an issue--and he denied that the port had been blocked, but he contacted Clearwire support, and was told by a manager that indeed the port was blocked. He put me in contact with this manager, who helped me figure out a port that would not be blocked, so I could set the VOIP modem to that port. During this time, he warned me that the speed would be throttled when the system registered the usage that was coming from my IP address and port.
I saw my speeds slowly degrade to unusable on all Internet access, not just VOIP, and by this time DSL had come to my area, so I took the modem in to the store to return it. The very unfriendly person who took the return informed me that I would be hit with a ~$300 termination fee, even though I had not agreed to a contract or terms, and she could not prove that I had.
As soon as the charge hit my AMEX, I filed a dispute on the charge, which was promptly reversed, and I never heard or saw anything again.
Cool story, huh?
I got clear internet last year, in order to cut the cable cord. For a couple months it was good, then I would frequently drop to sub 1 Mbps speeds for extended periods of time. I called support, and they told me that the best antenna was to the south of my house, so they told me to move the router to the other side of the house for best signal. The problem went away for a bit but came back, so I called again, and they said the best antenna was to the north. This was in the span of 2 weeks, so I doubt they suddenly built a brand new tower in that time period. So I moved the router back to the north and since I've not had a problem.
I'm more likely to believe that this was simply stupidity on the part of their support, and I have a hard time believing in conspiracy theories, but as evidence builds I start thinking crazy things like the fact that they are just doing a shuffle while they put me on their "do not throttle" list just to shut me up.
I know it's annecdotal and crazy...
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Ah, good. Now I have some interesting documentation to fend off the hordes of moronic sales people that Clear has stalking around the local mall.
The stuff they mailed to my home (Washington DC suburb) did not say "we don't throttle". Their terms of service said specifically that they reserved the right to throttle (What? You didn't at least skim them before signing up? Hand in your geek card.).
I signed my mother-in-law up for their service anyway - she's a light user, and their service is cheap compared to the other two Great Satans of telecom in the area, Comcast and Verizon. We got a home+mobile pair for $60/month - $30/month for faster-than-3G-when-it-works-mobile isn't bad.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
When Clearwire did this to me, all I did was write a lousy blog post about it and tell my friends not to use their service. Seeing something more substantive is impressive.
I use Clear in the Dallas Area. The USB dongle runs 3 to 5 mbit at work (24 miles from home) and the ‘Box’ runs 2 to 4 mbit at home. As with any RF system range is going to be an issue, so is its inherent bandwidth limitation (as with any system). Yes sometimes the data rate can get real bad, even drop out. This does not usually last a long time but it can be annoying. I have never experienced anything that I would believe as targeted or intentional limiting, however if enough people suck on the same straw at the same time what do you think is going to happen? As far as being able to get out of a contract for poor performance, maybe that has merit I don’t know. ..Clear provides me an alternative option, I Live in an urban connectivity hell, DSL for me is at best 2mbit, usually 1.4 or so. There is no upgrade available yet ( 3 blocks away it is a different story), and no Fios in my neighborhood. I own my home and it is not something I would sell over something that in 5 to 10 years will change.
Clear (sprint is involved here) has been having financial challenges lately, personally for me it would be sad to see them go. By the standards of the cable companies I would be a download hog. (multi part large WinRared binaries
Cool story, huh?
Informative, yes. Cool, no.
at making decisions than intelligent seniors with years of learned wisdom. You are an ignorant ass.
Their advertising and especially sales people and the TOS don't agree. I had an account for a while, but got a backup DSL from ATT. I ended up using only the backup line because even though it was the lowest priced package from ATT, it always worked and was always fast enough.
I ran 5 miles one day. The first mile was fine.
Given the premise, did I run 5 miles, or one?
Your pedantry needs work.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I am still happy with Clear's service compared to other similar broadband offerings in my area, especially on the price. My phone lines are too old for DSL to be much faster than 1mbit/s and fiber is still not in my neighborhood. Comcast is expensive and has the worst customer service I ever dealt with, along with the least overall stability. I remember downtime EVERY month for many years of Comcast service in several places.
Clear gives me typical speeds of around 100kbyte/s upload and 300-1100kbyte/s peak download depending mostly on load from other users. Median is probably somewhere around 500kbyte/s. I use easily dozens and dozens of gigabytes of traffic each month, so much of the time I spend throttled at their 60kbyte/s download limit. That sucks, but I'm still spending much less on service than DSL and usually getting significantly faster speeds. I still don't think the throttling is necessary. It's more a sign of bad system/network administrators that can't handle setting up proper traffic shaping flow control.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Clear Subscriber in ATL since day 1. All I could get in my 'hood was AT&T and Charter. The speeds for ATT were just 1.5 and Charter was charging me out the butt for 5M speed so I jumped at getting Clear. Not totally unhappy but...
Clear has been a pretty good ISP but (and it's a big butt) the speed I get with a home modem changes drastically. According to Clear I am about 500+ feet from the nearest tower and within the range of three so I get 5 bars all the time. I did a three day test to see where my bandwidth was at different times of the day. See the list below and you tell me they don't have issues with over-subing the service. All speeds are in Mps averaged over three days. Also these we average speeds to three servers one in Cali, one in NY, and one in WI.
12a 2a 4a 6a 8a 10a 12p 2p 4p 6p 8p 10p
8.3 8.5 8.6 6.7 4.2 3.5 1.4 2.6 2.4 1.5 1.2 4.5
I had a similar experience. I signed up for clearwire early on, and found the speed decent, however they were clearly throttling. Most thing worked fine, but anything involving a slightly longer download or video slowed down quite a bit.
My VPN connection to work also became unstable after several hours, although that later improved.
The best part was when the called me up to offer me the mobile version for a laptop. At the time my only laptop was running Linux and I asked if the card they were using was compatible. After several repeated assurances that it was, I said I'd try it out. Long story short, it wasn't compatible, and they tried to give me all sorts of hassle and run around to return the card and cancel the service even though it was within the "trial" period.
Friend of mine is a Clearwire customer that's been involved in the lawsuits pushed against the company. He stated one of their major faults isn't just the throttling, but the fact that they clandestinely altered their policy and service agreement on their website regarding it. No notification of change was given to the customers, as well as surreptitiously placing the altered statements deep in their website (several clicks to reach). This is all a shame, though. I'm a networking junkie that enjoys wireless especially, so I have been enticed to WiMax popping up - notably with Clearwire. Shame that it'll leave a big ole blemish in WiMax in general.
I live in NYC and I have a new MyTouch 4G from T-Mobile. I get decent service, fairly reliable, but not so much bandwidth. On a good day I get about 1.2 Mbps. On a bad day half that.
So I called T-Mobile sales and pretended to be interested in opening a new account and spoke to the sales rep about their hot new 4G mobile broadband service. I finally got around to getting him to claim that their new service in my neighborhood provides "up to 20 Mbps" (I had to explain to him that the little "b" means bits not bytes.) I said, "'up to' as in the maximum but I should expect less on average?" He assured me that it should be anywhere from 10-20 Mbps consistently, and he even narrowed it down to the block where I live. So I told him thanks-I'll think-about-it.
I hung up on the sales guy and called customer service and got myself quickly transferred to the tech department, and I explained my bandwidth dilemma. The tech person reiterated the sales guy's bandwidth claim and assured me they would do everything they can to remedy the situation. We went through a lengthy troubleshooting session during which we checked all of the settings on my phone and bounced it, but still no speedy. So she opened a trouble ticket and dispatched technicians to my zone and asked me to check back in 72 hours.
Five days later I called them back and told them still no speedy. The tech rep told me that the "engineers" still had not gotten around to checking my zone but they would do so very soon, and she opened a Service Request in which she fabricated my complete lack of signal and zero bandwidth and non-working broadband, all of which she claims would expedite my Service Request.
Three days later their "engineer" called me to tell me they had been to my zone and checked all their equipment and could I please check my bandwidth. I did but still blah. 0.67 Mbps. The "engineer" seemed perplexed and opened his own Service Request and assured me that they would fix it forthwith. That was two days ago.
Still, no speedy.
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
For awhile, ClearWire would randomly shut off my service between 10PM and midnight. Turns out they would be issuing redirects for a popup which failed my firewall rules so I never saw the popup. Even more irritating was the fact that help desk shuts down around the same time. End result, no internet overnight, which is harsh considering I have customers to support.
This has happened multiple times. Call them in the morning. Confusion, then "oh, ya" - and my service comes back up.
I'm happy to get the service, since I live in a rural area. Just wish they wouldn't send me disruptive marketing (or keep the help desk available to clean up) when they do.
Well I don't think what they did to you was very cool, I am desperate for any form of human companionship no matter how fallacious or fleeting it is, and you did call me your bro, so cool story brah.