I actually did have a topic planned for today, but since our Comcast high speed internet went down as I started to write, that topic has been shelved for a bit so I can give you my first impression of CLEAR’s 4G High Speed Mobile 4G Wireless Broadband service.
CLEAR is a relatively new player in the Chicago area, and we’ve been receiving promotional mailings for some time. The most recent one mentioned some special package rates, and also a 14-day free trial period. Since the Comcast service was so thoughtful as to go down while the mall was still open, it seemed like a good time to start the free trial with CLEAR.
This is actually sort of a second look, because Mom has had CLEAR service in Honolulu for almost three years now. At the time we set it up for her, the company was still called Clearwire and the service had not yet been upgraded to 4G WiMAX (that happened in January).
I decided to test the On-the-Go mobile internet because we have another provider’s mobile service contract expiring in December. I was given a 4G Mobile USB modem that will work with both PC and Mac. I’m testing it right now on my Sony VAIO laptop running Vista. Setup was super easy, as promised. So far, so good. Speeds are listed as up to 6Mbps down/1Mbps up; I don’t think I’m getting a full 6Mbps at the moment but it’s pretty healthy. I’m watching a YouTube video in another window and I’m not getting any unwanted skipping or pausing.
Back to Comcast for a second. We’ve had a lot of very brief periods of downtime this week, and today the service was down for about five hours. Every time I call Comcast when the internet service is down, they tell me that my modem is the problem. So far, it has never ended up being the problem, and it gets really annoying to be told it’s the modem when I’m usually 99% sure it is not. Including tonight. Only once did I get a support person who acknowledged that it might actually be a problem on the network and hunted it down.
When the service is working, it’s very speedy, though.
We’ll see how this trial goes, and hopefully it will help us make a good decision on whether to keep Comcast for home and switch to CLEAR for mobile only, or switch to CLEAR for both home and mobile. If you’ve tried both Comcast and CLEAR, please leave a comment with your thoughts and experiences!
(NaBloPoMo | July ’10: 2 of 31)