GregoryBowers.com

Okay, so after my rants about Clear being rather a joke, and several tweets about dealing with customer service and the need of sending out a tech to my home before considering any sort of refund, I have to say this: Honestly, they’re not that bad.

I’ve had far more headaches with customer service, tech support and the like from Comcast than my little circus with Clear resulted in. Things seemed a bit over the top, but the tech was super helpful, the customer service was always helpful and usually pretty happy and apologetic. And when I took the mobile wimax modem on a weekend trip, I found the speeds to be pretty sweet (for a mobile device).

What did I learn? Any sort of WiMax/4G broadband is HUGELY dependent on your area, the terrain, and a lot of little factors. If you, say, live in Portland and travel to, say, parts of Texas with frequency, Clear’s mobile 4G would be fantastic, and you’d probably have an easy time getting decent speeds at home. Unless you are in a hilly area (strike one against Seattle), have an apartment that faces away from the nearby towers (strike two for me), have a house with brick siding and double pane windows (strike three). Transitioning from a crazy fast connection speed like Comcast (I was between 20-30Mbps last I tested) to at even the best of WiMax speeds (~5-6Mbps) is kind of like having the pitcher nearly hitting you with one of the 3 strikes. I was only getting ~1Mbps downstream, which was closer to getting hit three times by the pitcher, only to have the ump call strikes each time.

Luckily, however, after the hoops, Clear did the right thing and said “Obviously our offering won’t work for you. Send in the modems and we’ll give you all your money back.” And they did, no strings. Any bitterness I might have harboured was blown away.

So I have to give a big thumbs up to Clear for handling things like a bunch of decent folks, instead of turning the screws like so many of their competitors.