Tuesday, December 11, 2007

clearwire sucks

Clearwire sucks. I was patient with them. I gave them far more chances than they deserved and now I'm probably going to get stuck with a $200 cancellation charge.


I got clearwire about 7 months ago and was initially happy with the service. I even recommended it to my sister. Then, without notification, they killed my connection. No warning, nothing. Just dropped. They said I'm using too much continuous bandwidth. So I asked for an indication of how much was acceptable. They asked me to reduce my use because it was hurting other users. So, wanting to be a good citizen, I capped my continuous up and down rates. A few weeks later, they drop my service again. Again with no notification. I call in and ask again if they have a usable definition of "acceptable use." Maybe this tech was new or didn't know the Clearwire policy of avoiding useful answers and he told me that down rates aren't a problem, but keep the up rate below 8 kB/sec and we should be fine. So, I did that and I was ready to live with it. Then they throttled P2P programs. They never said that they did, but it was obvious when they did it. One day I was getting a nearly continuous 150kB/sec down. The next day, I was lucky to see an intermittent high of 15kB/sec down. Again, they never notified users of a change of service. I would have stayed with them even through this P2P throttling, but now they've cut me down to limp mode (around 58kb/sec) to get me to call them again. The only problem is that my VoIP phone won't work at this transfer rate, they don't reply to incoming emails, and the people you can reach through their chat application are useless.

All up, they clearly don't want customers that intend to actually use their internet connections.


for lots of similar stories see the dedicated blog: Clearwire Sucks.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I will not recommend ClearWire and I am seeking legal advice concerning a possible legal action against ClearWire.

We have a small business and a business account for our website on RR, which has great speed and service but costs $300.00/month. ClearWire, at $49.00/Month seemed a cheaper option. After the salesperson stated clearly that my website could be moved from a cable account to ClearWire, we signed up. The modem arrived quickly and I attached my laptop to it for a week to verify connection, reliability and speed. Not great, but OK.

I then scheduled IT to switch our website to clearwire. After several attempts over three months, no luck. It seems that ClearWire does not support websites, despite continuing sales claims that they do.

I then had an interesting encounter with ClearWire when I requested a refund. I called ClearWire requesting a refund and was told that websites were not supported and we should not have expected them to be. I tend to record telephone transactions, so I mentioned that I have a recording from their sales person that clearly stated that websites were supported. Further, I had explained in detail my current setup with RR and what I wanted to switch it unchanged to ClearWire. I had been assured that there were no technical limitations and that my specific needs were no problem.

Upon hearing that I had a recording, I was asked if the current conversation was being recorded. I said it was, She replied she could not continue if the conversation was being recorded. I reminded her that ClearWire’s announcement stated that the conversation was being recorded. To paraphrase, she said that ClearWire’s recording was OK, but she could not continue if the customer was recording. I did shut off the recording as per her request. However, she just repeated her offer of a $180.00 fee to discontinue service.

We are considering legal action against ClearWire to recoup fees, IT expenses and other costs. We are soliciting input from anyone interested in joining a legal action against ClearWire email: “Clearwire.Action@gmail.com”.

Lee Dilley

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

P2P programs violate the terms of service for clearwire

Unknown said...

We got a new laptop and no internet service, so we decided to get clearwire. at first clearwire seemed fast because we didnt have internet before, but i went to my friends house and his internet was so fast. he could download things in a minute that would have taken me hours with clearwire. he was using Comcast. since everyone in our neighborhood uses comcast we asked the sales person if it was faster than comcast, and she said she use to use comcast and clearwire is much much faster than comcast. so we bought it. now the internet is so slow i have to go to my friends house to use the internet. we still have a year of clearwire to go.

Gary Smith said...

Clearwire sucks and blows, there is no doubt about it. I have battled with Clearwire in my area forever, being in a rural area of Texas I don't have any options for high-speed internet, especially not Clearwire (since they are so far from high-speed).

http://www.clearwireblows.com - Join the Revolution, Spread the Word, Force them to Improve or Go Away