Short version:

Promising, but not good enough.

Long version:

Unreliable modem and/or signal. Slow speeds when connected. This weird mysterious downward spiral of speed until the 4G connection is gone.

Listen, I wanted to like it. For the amount I’m paying Comcast, I would have had home internet with true unlimited usage and a WiMAX USB modem for my laptop. I got it today a little after lunch and plugged that sucker in. And that’s when the problems started.

The modem has five little lights to indicate the signal strength similar to a mobile phone. With one exception, I could only get three lights on in a reliable manner no matter where in my house I tried. I tried it by every window, exterior wall and high place I could get to. I even tried up in the attic (my freaking hot, hot attic) which has no power receptacle. I used an extension cord. At that point I was just trying to see if I could get more than three little lights (answer: not in the attic). I finally got it to flirt with four, but that was in the garage. Not really a plausible location for placement.

So I set it up high and wired it to my wireless router. Which then precipitated a lot of f’ing around with the settings on both the modem and the router. Did I mention the documentation was a little, tiny booklet? No help at all. No problems, I’ll hop on Google and… crap.

Turns out (and I had to pull out my old rusty skills from my networking days), between the router and the modem I had not only two DHCP servers trying to duke it out, I also had the Battlin’ NATs. A quick configuration change, and all my stuff connected fine. I have to seriously wonder how Joe Average would be able to hook up his little commodity Linksys router to this thing.

After all that, getting online was straight forward. But the heartbreak continued. I went to a couple sites to test the speed of my connection. I was consistently getting between 3 and 5 Mbps. Which is good. For 2001. In comparison, I get 19-21 Mbps on my low tier Comcast connection.

Then the weirdness happened. I started getting 2 Mbps and then 1, and then nothing and I got knocked off. What was happening was I was loosing the the signal over about 45 seconds. It would be at three lights, then it would drop to two, then one, and finally I’d have no lights. After about a minute of no lights it would pop back up to 3 lights and I could connect to the Internet again.

I never did get a chance to test my VPN connection to work, since it was at that point I threw in the towel. Thankfully, there’s a 14 day trial period, but I think my little 90 minute test run is enough.

So, is there any situation where I would want to use Clear WiMAX service? Sure, if the only other service I could get was dial up.