Leaving Clearwire, where now?

manonmir

Hi,

I live in south dublin, NTL is not available in my area yet and they can't tell me when it will be.

I am currently on Clearwire and am leaving as it's gone so much downhill in the last month or so with web browsing, gaming, voip, p2p all working very slowly if at all. Clearwire tech support weren't sure when p2p or gaming may improve if at all, they say that due to certain users traffic they had to restrict a load of services to maintain their browsing speed.

I cannot get ADSL in my area as the exchange has no new openings so I'm stuck with a wireless solution, i don't want to make the same mistake again and i'm obviously not going to sign up to IBB.

Can you point me in the right direction?

Cheers,
Gary

projectmayhem

eek

i was gonna say IBB, but they're just as bad if not worse from what i've heard. are eircom doing wireless bb?

Blaster99

Where specifically in South Dublin? There are a few other options.

stakey

I can empathise with ya there mate, had to put up with clearwire's lame excuses for 2 months now as I organise DSL

You might be interested in Metro...

Have a read here... http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=309016

manonmir

i'm in deansgrange.

would it be fair to say metro are my only real option?

Check out these *impressive* pings to yahoo on clearwire, I really need to change fast!!!

Pinging yahoo.com [66.94.234.13] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 66.94.234.13: bytes=32 time=199ms TTL=56
Reply from 66.94.234.13: bytes=32 time=704ms TTL=56
Reply from 66.94.234.13: bytes=32 time=207ms TTL=56
Reply from 66.94.234.13: bytes=32 time=1681ms TTL=56

jay-me

I was thinking of getting clearwire for the simple facts that you can plug it in anywhere and don't need a phoneline does this not somehow out-weigh the slow speeds?

Blaster99

For some people it doesn't work at all, but I think those are in a [vocal] minority. Most users would find the affects of their traffic shaping annoying, but if you do nothing but browse the web it's extremely fast. If you want to do anything else, they're an infuriating ISP to deal with. Anything else being gaming, VoIP, streaming audio, Skype.

The reality is that for the same money you can get BT ADSL without all the hassle. Well, you may experience different sort of hassle dealing with BT, but at least the service will work.

jay-me

Yeah despite all that ANYWHERE you can plug it in ANYWHERE now that is sweeeeet.

Blaster99

Yes it is sweet, but when you want to do something that Clearwire doesn't like this week, it's everything but sweet. The two things Clearwire have going for them is that you'll get the service installed within a day and you can take it with you within their coverage area. If you're sharing a house or whatever, it's pretty convenient. It's just a bummer they have to mess around with the traffic so much.

jay-me

Blaster99 wrote:

Yes it is sweet, but when you want to do something that Clearwire doesn't like this week, it's everything but sweet. The two things Clearwire have going for them is that you'll get the service installed within a day and you can take it with you within their coverage area. If you're sharing a house or whatever, it's pretty convenient. It's just a bummer they have to mess around with the traffic so much.

And will this not in time sort itself all out?

dub45

jay-me wrote:

And will this not in time sort itself all out?

Only Clearwire know that and in the meantime why should customers be paying good money when the service is not what they thought there were going to get?

manonmir

I signed up in September, things were decent enough for the first couple of weeks but lately it's awful.

Yes it is nice that you can just plug it in and it works but for me to even go onto the web and browse the web can be very annoying. Sites can take ages to respond and take a long time to display the page, especially graphics rich pages. I like to listen to internet radio stations, these don't run smoothly and streaming video isn't worth trying anymore.

The speed also isn't up to much, irishisptest.com/myspeed tells me that my speed can be anywhere from 200k to 2mbs with the average somewhere around 800k, that isn't even reflected in the experience of web browsing.

Downloads don't usually clock in higher than 50k and when using p2p and skype it doesn't seem any better than dialup.

I need an ISP who can offer me reasonable speed broadband so I can browse the web fast and have the advertised speed realised, even closely! On the plus side I have only paid 20 euro for three months due to referrals and discounts at the start of the service, in saying that the people who I referred the service to aren't overly happy with me at the moment

sisyphus

The two things Clearwire have going for them is that you'll get the service installed within a day and you can take it with you within their coverage area. If you're sharing a house or whatever, it's pretty convenient.

All very well if you're moving house to two doors down on the same street (Which I'm sure doesn't actually happen in most cases). If you're moving to an alternative part of the city however, then chances are your Clearwire won't be worth a damn, as their coverage area is miniscule! In summation therefore, this roaming option is completely pointless, unless they actually can provide a proper city-wide coverage area (Which is very unlikely to happen).

As for the performance, I have mine since September. Initially, for the first 3-4 weeks, it worked like a dream. From then on however, it has been extremely inconsistent. Some nights, I get average ping response times to my default gateway of 2000-3000 ms with packet loss in the range of 30-60%, other times, they're as low as 20-50 ms with 0% loss! Then there was the whole blocking of non-standard ftp ports. This was eventually changed back to the default after about 2 weeks. Currently, the connection is performing reasonably well, but it's still very restricted. p2p is not an option, and VoIP is unusable 90% of the time. As for the download speeds, they can vary from a solid 250 KBps (i.e. 2000 mbps) to 4 KB/ps (i.e. 32 kbps) from an optimal Irish based server like ftp.heanet.ie or esat.ie, so again, consistency is certainly not something I've experienced with it over the last few weeks.

Unfortunately, it's currently my only option really, as I can't get a phone line installed, and RipWave coverage is too weak in my area, so there's little I can do except put up with it, and hope for the company to get their ass in gear!!

Blaster99

manonmir wrote:

i'm in deansgrange.

would it be fair to say metro are my only real option?

They're _still_ out of ports in that exchange? I heard about that over a year ago. You may want to check back to make sure it hasn't changed.

Deansgrange, yes Metro is it.

BigMoose

manonmir wrote:

i'm in deansgrange.

Do you know which exchange? I'm on Rochestown and was vaguely considering going back to DSL from IBB assuming they arse up my connection again if/when they next upgrade speeds.

I'm lothed to say this for 2 reasons, one I'll probably get slated and two getting more people on my mast is not in my interest, but the Belmont IBB mast has been pretty solid recently. I've had it just over a year and it's been pretty much full speed in the last couple of months. Was perfect until the speed increases last year too. This is Breeze and not Ripwave!

sisyphus

Oh great, last night, I had ping response time to my default gateway of 30-50 ms. Now I have the below again! Man, I'm getting pretty sick of this:

Pinging 83.134.128.1 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=498ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=727ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=554ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=565ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=600ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=679ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=599ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=820ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=530ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=683ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=485ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=614ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=450ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=503ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=497ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=482ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=451ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=591ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=627ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=580ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=500ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=678ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=573ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=518ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=563ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=474ms TTL=58
Reply from 83.134.128.1: bytes=32 time=594ms TTL=58

Ping statistics for 83.134.128.1:
Packets: Sent = 27, Received = 27, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 450ms, Maximum = 820ms, Average = 571ms