Clearwire fooling customers

Niall1234

Anyone know of the rumours that Clearwire don't block any ports during the 7 day trial yet the second the trial ends they start blocking the ports as you are then locked into a contract with them ?

Friend on Clearwire was certain that E-Mule was working when he first got it and yet doesn't work anymore.

game4it70

hi i used 2 have crapwire.when i got it first it all worked then they used 2 block p2p or gaming.i could only do 1 thing at a time.so i'd agree with you that they do that.

Begs

I've had clearwire for a week, and its going back unless their engineers can fix the download speed.

I'm currently downloading p2p at a fab 1 kbps - i kid you not. Oh hold on, now up to 3 kbps!!

Blaster99

They deliberately throttle P2P, so good luck with that.

con1982

Clearwire blocks azzerus, limewire, emule, etc..................
Do not use if you wanna do some "file sharing".............

lionellobo

would you know if they block VOIP ports too? I could use skypeout / yahoo voice chat before but I cannot do so since a while now.

antodeco

best thing to do is ring up and make sure its "activated" on your account.

Sponge Bob

lionellobo wrote:

would you know if they block VOIP ports too? I could use skypeout / yahoo voice chat before but I cannot do so since a while now.

did skype work during the trial only ???

lionellobo

I called them up several times & they said its activated, that it maybe a firewall issue, which I've determined is not. I'm in Rathmines.

It worked after the trial, and stopped about the time they had a major service disruption a few months back.

RangeR

lionellobo wrote:

I called them up several times & they said its activated, that it maybe a firewall issue, which I've determined is not. I'm in Rathmines.

It worked after the trial, and stopped about the time they had a major service disruption a few months back.

I was with Clearwire for 12 months when they first setup. I did exstensive testing on many different internet applications at the time. The only ones that worked any way prperly were surfing and email.

In their quest to block/throttle P2P, they hit every protocol on the way down. For me; VoIP [SIP] and Steam based games sucked as I was getting a good bit of packet loss and very poor quality.

I would NOT recommend them.

aphex™

I rang their sales up pretending to be clueless and they told me Skype, p2p and Xbox live worked grand- or more specifically one of their techy guys was using it on their service grand. Hmmm. Well it would work if he could configure it to do so on their end, wouldn't it?

Seriously ring their sales and pretend to know nothing about the internet and see what you can get them to say works (Skype etc).. beats watching crap on tv for 10 mins.. then at the end tell them you heard from a friend their service is rubbish and you wouldn't get it if it were €5 a month

formatman

If they have a decent Firewall they should be able to block all the different varients of P2P without blocking Skype

It depends though how much of a shoestring they are running the business on

flamegrill

No firewall will block ISP level traffic effectively. Clear have boxes that look for particular types of traffic that match peer to peer type profiles. This sort of traffic gets blocked on the fly.

We for example had 100's of support tickets because one day it randomly decided to block port 2222 into our linux hosting machines. We raised it with them and had our netblock "whitelisted". But thats a professional courtesy and I'd doubt would extend to other ISP's.

They service is good for what it is, its not ideal for torrenting or playing games. But for the average internet using Joe it should be ideal for email and web access. The ability to move the modem anywhere is cool aswell, aswell as it being delivered the next day.

Paul

formatman

I'm talking about Sonicwalls wherby you are blocking a packet based on deep inspection and not the port its coming in or going out on

flamegrill

Client side or ISP side?

ISP side isn't easy. well not without spending a lot of money. You'd be dealing with multi GigaBit/s traffic levels going over different ISP's/routers/physical connections. You'd also be dealing with millions of new concurrent sessions/second let alone already established connections.

Most probably they have devices that profile traffic based on content, source port and destination port and basically shape that traffic not block it. So it will work, but just ludiciously slow.

Anyway back on topic. I don't believe that Clearwire are doing anything to fool customers. It is widely known that the parent company blocks VOIP traffic as they have their own service, bit anti-competitive that, but its their network.

Regarding torrenting etc, while there are legit uses, 99% of the case is that people are using it to get access to illegal or copyright material, in a way clearwire are preventing their users breaking the law and getting themselves in trouble while also protecting the service speeds for normal web/email traffic that 90% of users use broadband for.

I'm sorry guys, but torrenting and downloading movies, mp3s, apps and other things are only for the minority of users and as such you end up with 10% of customers using 90% of the resources available and clear are protecting service for everyone by doing their traffic shaping on certain service types.

Paul

the_syco

Whats the bets they're only blocking the default ports?

ZENER

Avoid - Avoid - Avoid !!!

Clearwire use port shaping to restrict traffic they deem undesirable. They don't seem to block based on ports but as suggested above they inspect each packet and restrict based on content.

I was one of the first to join with them in Swords (July 2005), fantastic service for about 2 or 3 months after joining then the s**t started. 10K d/ls from Limewire - rubbish Skype quality - unable to access a website using port 8080 - VPN stopped working. I emailed them cancelling the account and requesting a return address for their modem - nothing. June this year they hit the direct debit for 10 seperate payments - almost 500 quid !! Got it all back thanks to my bank and again called them cancelling the account 1 month later they took all the money back again over three days with 3 or 4 DDs each day, wan***s.

Jokers, unless you are desperate don't have anything to do with these jokers !

ZEN