Clearwire Broadband

[mirwillbeback]

Anyone know anything about this, sounds great, 30per month, no land line needed.

Is it too good to be true?

[MunsterCycling]

Indeed it is, port blocking, speed throttling etc...

MC

[ambasite]

getting wireless modem from them tomorrow, one week trial, not sure if my address in galway is in range of their signal.

Munster Cycling port blocking/speed throttling?? does not sound good...

[RangeR]

They may not admit that they block or throttle ports but in my extensive testing when I had clearwire and BT, they were doing some real nasty stuff.

Also affects online gaming. World of Warecraft and Steam based games are the ones I know of.

VPN can be bad, VoIP can be quite bad at times.

[Mark1]

I can agree with IrishTLR VoIP (skype) works only badly you can hear other party but they can't hear you at all most of time or else very garbled. gave up with P2P only way i have found to transfer large files is to up load to a web site. Other softphones seem to be blocked alltogether. We have no land line and limited options of provider.

[generalmiaow]

My problems with Clearwire:

1. Not responding to emails, and when they do, they just tell you to ring them. And when you ring them, they give you half-baked answers.

2. Not having a set day of the month when they take their direct debit from you.

3. No way of logging in to view your account details online. (how much bandwidth you've used, etc)

4. Unreliable service. No connection roughly 10% of the time.

5. Block ports 2082 and 2095, so if you have a website with squirrelmail or cPanel, you're screwed (like me).

6. Slower than advertised. I'm supposedly on a 2Mb connection, it barely breaks 0.7 Mb most of the time. Sometimes it's slower than dial-up.

7. Block VoIP, including Skype and possibly even voice over MSN messenger, or maybe that's just because they're so slow.

8. Block Peer to Peer, Bittorrent, etc.

9. FTP Traffic is 1/2 the speed of HTTP. Both ways.

10. Online games such as BF2 and Steam games etc, exhibit high pings and occasionally, for weeks on end, cannot connect whatsoever.

Things I like about Clearwire:

[RangeR]

Originally Posted by generalmiaow

Things I like about Clearwire:

To be fair, you should have put in, "do not need a phone line" as that is a big seller to a lot of people.

[generalmiaow]

Originally Posted by IrishTLR

To be fair, you should have put in, "do not need a phone line" as that is a big seller to a lot of people.

I agree that it is an (the?) advantage to Clearwire, but it is no longer one of the things that I like about them. We are in fact, having a phone line installed just to get away from them.

[generalmiaow]

ooh, and add to that the fact that my girlfriend can't access her university webmail, and infact, I can't use any smtp server except mail.clearwire.ie.

Of course I'll be compiling all these complaints to send to them once the contract is up. Who can I send this to in Clearwire to ensure it's read? Would love a full page newspaper ad, but I suppose a letter will do, but of course don't want to send it to someone who will just throw it out without opening it (like their support staff for example)

[edit:] Just realised I'm off on a rant. Sorry thread. My point to the OP was yes, it's too good to be true

[ronanp]

Its an awful service. Wasn't too bad at the start, was getting connection speeds of about 1.8mb. Nowadays though if you're planning on using it for anything where reliability of connection is an issue (like online poker!) then forget it, quality of service sometimes as low as 1%. No good having a speedy ping reply if yer only getting a reply half the time.

Have been trying to cancel it but support is ****e. Always has been. Have worked on a few helpdesks myself and I know when i'm being fobbed off!

Initially was being told there was ongoing 'upgrade' work that may be causing issues, i'd be phoned back when it was over (never happened).

Another outage "I'll check into that and phone you back in ten minutes" (10 minutes before closing time, funnily enough, and never happened).

They were going to send someone around to see if my signal could be improved, made an appointment. (yeah you guessed it, never happened, and no phone call).

DNS servers stopped working at one stage, was having to use eircoms DNS instead, rang the helpdesk, was told there couldn't be a dns problem or they'd know about it. Cough cough.

Someone from customer services was supposed to ring me back a few days ago when I tried to cancel my account, never happened, my account got charged a couple of days later anyway. Seems the only way to cancel it is by blocking payments through the bank.

Avoid it like the plague.

[RangeR]

Originally Posted by generalmiaow

ooh, and add to that the fact that my girlfriend can't access her university webmail, and infact, I can't use any smtp server except mail.clearwire.ie.

This is a standard security block with many ISP's. It should not be a problem for most people.

[generalmiaow]

Originally Posted by IrishTLR

This is a standard security block with many ISP's. It should not be a problem for most people.

I don't know for sure about that... in my experience while it's true that most ISP's will block their own mailserver from outside, and I know they blacklist from inside mailservers that are known open mail relays, most of the ISPs I've dealt with in the past have allowed me to send mail from smtp servers outside their service. Besides, it's not even a consistent block. One day out of five I can use other mailservers (though I'm capped at less than 1KB/sec), the rest I cannot. Sometimes I can use some servers, and not others. There's no sense to it at all. I do agree, however, that it doesn't matter once I can send mail from A server.

However, nowhere did they tell me about the existence of mail.clearwire.ie ... I emailed them asking whether they provided an email service, and they wrote back three weeks later telling me to ring their hotline.

[RangeR]

Originally Posted by generalmiaow

Besides, it's not even a consistent block. One day out of five I can use other mailservers (though I'm capped at less than 1KB/sec), the rest I cannot. Sometimes I can use some servers, and not others. There's no sense to it at all. I do agree, however, that it doesn't matter once I can send mail from A server.

Didn't everyone know that they do testing on their Network from 9am to 5pm, Monday through Friday. It's a continual testing phase that I don't think will ever end. Clearwire were great before they officially launched their product. I have no time for them anymore.

Originally Posted by generalmiaow

However, nowhere did they tell me about the existence of mail.clearwire.ie ... I emailed them asking whether they provided an email service, and they wrote back three weeks later telling me to ring their hotline.

Classic Clearwire. Gave me a nice Friday Laugh

[Eyeofthetiger]

Yes it is too good to be true!
Went with them cos of the whole no landline needed thing and the cheap IBB not being available in my area.

Been with them since November and since then the only payment they have managed to process correctly is my first one...somehow someone has managed to take down my credit card number and my bank account details everytime I have given them..which lead to me being charged for 4 month's worth all at once and without any notice.

Was cut off by them for a while in April cos apparently I was uploading too much and the traffic they could see was Skype which I didn't even have on my computer. This went on for 2 weeks with them basically telling me it was all my fault when there was nothing going on my side... they had a record number of connections into my laptop when neither the router nor my laptop were even switched on. took ages to get them to switch it back on again everytime I rang up the guy said he had to wait till the next day to do it...the day he could actually do it I rang and was told he would ring me back straight away and I waited 2 hrs for him then I tried ringing again and got straight through to him..obviously he was too busy to be calling me. And I got charged for these 2 weeks!

All in all a pack of imcompetent lazy people and I will definitely be ending my contract with them when it runs out!

/end rant

[mivec]

im only finding all this out now its a pity i didnt ask any1 on this site before, im so angry that they have stopped all my p2p connections.... they worked before now its totally stopped.... not impressed