So, I switched to Clear (wireless internet provider) about 4 months ago. It’s been working fine, but I did notice recently things downloading a bit more slowly. I didn’t think much of it, however I was adding a PoE switch on my network and I needed to get into my Clear router, and I noticed that it said my download/upload speed was ~400kbps download and ~200kbps upload. Odd I thought, so I went to speedtest.net to check. Speedtest.net reported that I was at about ~7.3 Mbps down and ~800kbps up. I thought that was odd. I ran a few more tests and I was seeing a total mismatch from what speedtest.net was telling me.
So, I went to mlab (Google’s throttle detector) and what do you know, it’s reporting that I am ~400kpbs download and ~200kbps upload. So, based on several tests it would appear that Clear IS throttling me, however it lets me have an “unfiltered” connection to speedtest.net. That’s pretty shady if you ask me. Plus, I’m not a heavy bandwidth user…I stream from DI.fm pretty much all the time (128k stream) so, that’s not a lot. I buy iTunes, and I use my IP phone for work…and I play WoW / StarCraft, so I’m not a heavy BW user, and so I’m upset that I’m being throttled…but, I think that it’s just really shady that they do this.
I’ve had a few other gripes about Clear, here they are…
1. It seems to go out every night for about 10 minutes. I have the higest teir that I can so I should be getting “notice” of any downtime.
2. The modems for Clear are bad. You must use your Clear modem as the gateway, and frankly it lacks a decent feature set. No QoS. No VLAN support. I could go on…
3. Their tier-1 support is really, really bad (very nice), but they really don’t know anything…including basic terminology.
I’ll be moving back to Road Runner ASAP.
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