Gray's blog

Alright, I’m fed up with this god damn service!

I have called ‘tech support’ many times and heard all kinds of crazy stories & ideas on how to fix my connection issues including but not limited to:

- Duct tape modem to window
- ‘Your modem is connecting to a tower across the lake when your surrounded by them’..
- ‘We know it’s slow’
- Youtube is not considered ‘normal internet use’

This bullshit is coming from a company that pitches ‘go beyond 3g’ on their billboards. If anyone wants proof t-mobile’s 3g on a wifi tether is faster then this feel free to drop a comment, but rest assured it kills it.

Clearwire reps/tech support also admit that it is slow and much slower then T-Mobile’s 3g. They make claims about Wi-Max but I doubt that service will be better. Not to mention it hasn’t rolled out yet.

Let’s just see the average day on clearwire’s speedtest:

Which is about 1/3 the speed of decent dial up. Ugh.

This is with 5 out of 5 bars on the modem by the way. And this is on a day when the internet service itself actually works, outages are regular occurrences. I’m also on my second modem, due to the other one completely failing to connect _at_all_ after several months of use.

I have NEVER received the ‘1.5′ mbps of speed my service plan dictates. Yesterday, a 10mb download ended up taking 2 hours.

This is, without a doubt, the worst internet service I’ve ever used.

Edit:

So I decided to speedtest T-Mobile’s 3g to compare. A couple things first:

- Contrary to the image, I am not in kansas.
- The ping time went down about 200ms on average after I did this test.
- This is the WORST it has ever been (Tethered 3g), although it still kills clearwire it’s not SUPER fast.

The proof is in the pudding here.

Edit Again:

So about a day after posting this (19 hours), my internet speed suddenly increased beyond anything it has before. Ever in 2 years of having it:

I also noticed the amount of bars went from 5 to 3, and the speed increased significantly. Meaning the tower I was connected to changed, although the positioning of the modem did not. I find it a bit odd that the time I get the fastest internet I have had comes a day after posting this, but that’s a bit I’m not going to touch on.

Ciao,
Gray