Comments on: Clearwire: Clearly NOT Worth It?

By: Chris Marx

Chris Marx — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 04:20:57 +0000

I have had clearwire in seattle also… and i’m trapped!!!

At first I was fine with the service. It was functional.
Here are the issues:

-ITS SLOWER… can barely handle youtube during the day.
-AT PEAK USAGE TIMES its very sluggish. This is consistently 6pm-9pm every day. When you most want to use the internet…
-IM TRAPPED and if I want to get out of the service, I have to pay the early termination fee.
-EXPENSIVE…

I’m not recommending clearwire to ANYONE.

By: Lin

Lin — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 03:08:36 +0000

I have alot of thoughts about all the comments. I have had Clearwire for a year, i originally talked myself into it because i was trying to get away from Comcast and the high bills, Clearwire sounded perfect, i have a 15 year old son who likes to play online games, not games like WOW< just simple ones, so i talked to the clearwire rep about the difference in the speed with Comcast and Clearwire, i was told downloads would be a bit slower, but i should barely be able to tell a difference just surfing the web.
of course i did not THINK about it when i bought it, that the modem has to be IN a Window, and that my office window is on the opposite wall of my computer, i have reasons i do not want my computer sitting right by the window… so we would have to pull and stretch to different locations just to get at most 2 bars, it was NOT awful, when surfing it usually was not really that much different than surfing with comcast, When you DO notice is when you are say.. watching a TV show online, streams are EXTREMELY slow and most often lock up finally, same with the online games.
Anyway, it STILL somewhat served my purpose so i kept it until we moved, now i can not get a signal, my office does not face the southeastern or whatever it is sky to even try. So of course i called Clearwire and told them i wanted to cancel, i was under the impression for some reason that i had a one year contract, Like everyone else, i was told i would have to pay the 180.00 fee, and i was like, EXCUSE ME? for a service i can not use? that is robbery, and should not be allowed, so she asked if i had a “friend” that would like clearwire service, i just laughed, not hardly.. so her next suggestion was for me to go to Craigslist and post on there that i have this one year left in a contract etc, etc.. and they would remove me and put on whoever wanted the service, oh.. they WOULD get ONE whole free month of service.. whatever, i thankfully have a great legal plan and am going to look into this on Tuesday, i was just billed yesterday for another month, of a service i do not use, i am back with Comcast, and though not thrilled with them either, at least i have service!

By: Ripon, Ca.

Ripon, Ca. — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:24:00 +0000

Well, I just learned that internet terrorism truly begins at home, with Clearwire. The fact that a company that provides such a poor quality of service can be so arrogant as to selectively slow down my connection even more, to punish my family for using the internet, and then threaten to disconnect us if we continue to violate their TOS is beyond belief.
After receiving a threatening email from them telling me I needed to call them IMMEDIATELY, I ended up being on hold for an hour and 45 minutes. Then, they can’t tell me specifically what web site(s) or what actions occurred to cause the so called infraction, but if it continues, they can disconnect me and charge an early termination fee. How am I supposed to control what they can’t define? I have 4 teenagers in the house. They are using the internet for all the same sites that every other teenager in America is using it for.
I also work for a major defense contractor and work from home three days a week. I frequently use email to support our field service representatives, supporting the US Army and Marines, stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other military installations world wide. Now I have to deal with threats from people acting like the Clearwire internet Nazis, for using a lousy service, that I’m paying for?
Well, I drive around my town a lot. I’m putting stickers on my car and van that Clearly reads http://WWW.CLEARWIRESUCKS.COM. I hope some of you will do the same.

By: Screwed by clearwire

Screwed by clearwire — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:57:28 +0000

Still going through this crap with clearwire. Now that I’ve finally got $200 to give them for no reason (cancellation fee), they seem to be trying to prevent me from returning my modem!!! WTF??? They have to send a UPS return label to an email address and the first one I gave them was my work, never got the UPS label, oddly I did get a email from clearwire stating there were changes to my account, funny I’d get one but not the one I need huh? 2nd email was sent to my gmail account, which has NEVER EVER missed any email I’ve had sent to it. Guess what? Never got a UPS label in my gmail account. I just called them again and told them to send it to my clearwire account. Can’t give me any excuses why it wouldn’t show up there can they? Well it’s been an hour now and I’ve still not seen an email from them. If I get billed for another month I will be contacting a lawyer since they are trying there hardest to make sure I can’t cancel my account.

I seriously urge anyone thinking about getting CW to reconsider, these people are absolute scum.

By: Pissed on ClearWire

Pissed on ClearWire — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:38:58 +0000

Just got ClearWire and it SUCKS!… Beware!!! UpLoad and DownLoad are very slow…. at times, it made it seem like dial-up was faster. I went ahead and paid the early termination fee… I fifured that it wil be cheaper for me in the long run and don’t have to deal with all the B.S. ClearWire? more like ScamWire!

By: Another Clearwire user

Another Clearwire user — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:42:34 +0000

I also was screwed by Clearwire. As other users have said, there service is really only useful if you do nothing other than surfing the web. I’ve had the service just over a month and can’t even express how much I regret it. They capped my bandwidth and are still charging me the same price ($25 month promotional 3 months, and when that’s up it’s $50). They refuse to let me out of my contract unless I pay an Early Termination Fee of $215.

DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT GETTING CLEARWIRE

By: Rod

Rod — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 04:20:15 +0000

After signing up for Clearwire I cancled it within hours
two weeks later my phone was turned off.
Clearwire had taken my phone number and would not release
it back.

By: alex

alex — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 16:09:34 +0000

I am in Europe right now, I signed a deal with clearwire here. This is all I have to say – download speed: 60kbps, upload speed: 7kbps, restricted access to services like utube, skipe, yahoo, generally any kind of online game or internet phone, or webcam, or anything that is more than browsing or checking your email. I was billed 3 times in February but I cannot access my account to see what for, since they didn’t give me an account in the first place. On Monday I am going to check it out at their HQ and see what I can do about it. I should block their access to my account and pay cash from now on, I cannot terminate the contract because of the canceling fee. However, I am leaving the country in June and they said that I wont have to pay any fee if this is the case. I will ask them again to see if they stick to their story, from what I have read here, I am worried about all this. A word of advice for all people: do not sign up for clearwire if you are a foreigner, they treat like s*** the people who are citizens in that country, imagine how they’d rip off a foreigner.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 03:02:58 +0000

I guess that I get to be one of the lone voices of dissent here. I signed up for Clearwire about three weeks ago and am very happy with it. I switched from Time Warner cable (Roadrunner) due to reliability/outage issues, inability to reach their tech support (busy signals over multiple days), and a service tech who couldn’t give a s*** about helping to resolve the problems I was experiencing with dropped packets and latency.

I ordered Clearwire from their web site on a Thursday night, received the box on Saturday and got it all setup in less than 10 minutes. I consistently get 5 lights for signal strength and have experienced rock solid service.

Yes, it’s not as fast as my cable service, but it’s been more reliable. It meets my needs for both my personal usage, as well as my work usage as I work from home and connect to work using VPN.

My only complaint is that the upload speed is slow – 256Kbps. But I find that the majority of the time that it’s OK.

I’m excited about Clearwire, and am looking forward to them migrating over to WiMAX with hopefully increased speeds.

By: Dennis

Dennis — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 11:37:50 +0000

I would like to formally voice my complain on this site since the Clearwire people don’t have any sense of accountability and responsability. They think that by just being corteous and polite they can just be absolved so you go away and not pursue or demand better service.
My guess is that they buy time to make you ride the poor service so that the longer you stay with them the more reason they feel they have to force you to stay on regardless of how long and often you have called and complained.
What we need here is a class action suit and make them get off their high horse and stand and deliver or get off the pot.

By: Alec

Alec — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 04:26:28 +0000

I signed up for Clearwire in March 07. I did not want to pay the $50 activation fee for the 1 year contract so the sales guy at the Clearwire store told me that if I signed the 2 year contract the cancellation fee was only $50 anyway so I might as well sign the 2 year contract. So now I have another year left on my contract and I am sick of this service. I went down to cancel and the rep at the office that day told me it would be $220 to cancel. I told her what the previous rep had said and asked her if there was anything I could do and she said no. I told her that when I signed up I wasn’t given anything to review. The piece of paper I signed had nothing on it indicating the cancellation fee.

I told her that I was moving to a house about a mile away, well within their coverage map and I cannot get a signal anywhere in the house. She told me that I could cancel and pay the fee or keep the service and pay $42/month and not use it. Thanks!

My friend recently called to cancel his service after his renewal only to find that they auto renewed his contract. They told him that he could give the service to a friend instead. He said no way he would ever do that to a friend… lol. I agree. I am spreading the word about how horrible Clearwire is. Activation fees and contracts are BS. They should be able to sustain without either by providing a quality service.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:24:00 +0000

In August of 06, I signed up for clearwire’s service. I’m renting a home which is not compatible with cable (yeah I know). I am also outside of the Comcast service area anyway. I talked with the clearwire guys about how I enjoyed gaming online. The people at Best Buy representing Clearwire were “very helpful.” They told me that they had personally been playing games like Halo 2, PDZ, WoW, and other online games with greater success than with Charter or Comcast. So here I am thinking “so it’s this or dial-up…” I sign up for a two-year contract. Then I get the VoIP phone to save money. While here is the problem. Clearwire is about as flaky as a squirrel on meth. Sometimes it’s o.k. then other times it is utter crap. Oh, and don’t pay attention to the bars; they mean nothing. I have a consistent 4 bars of 5, but the speed is completely random. Also, with the wonderful *cough* quality of VoIP, I can barely make out what people are saying half of the time. And to top it off, whenever I get a phone call or make one, I get signed out of whatever game I might be playing (This includes attempting to use a headset in-game).

One more thing…I used to enjoy torrenting files. Downloads are definitely limited. I will guarantee that, server-side, Clearwire limits bandwidth to those using P2P or torrents.

I would not recommend this service to anyone at all. They are nowhere near cheap enough to match the “value” of their service.

By: Lee Dilley

Lee Dilley — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:12:11 +0000

I will not recommend ClearWire and I am seeking legal advice concerning a possible legal action against ClearWire.

We have a small business and a business account for our website on RR, which has great speed and service but costs $300.00/month. ClearWire, at $49.00/Month seemed a cheaper option. After the salesperson stated clearly that my website could be moved from a cable account to ClearWire, we signed up. The modem arrived quickly and I attached my laptop to it for a week to verify connection, reliability and speed. Not great, but OK.

I then scheduled IT to switch our website to clearwire. After several attempts over three months, no luck. It seems that ClearWire does not support websites, despite continuing sales claims that they do.

I then had an interesting encounter with ClearWire when I requested a refund. I called ClearWire requesting a refund and was told that websites were not supported and we should not have expected them to be. I tend to record telephone transactions, so I mentioned that I have a recording from their sales person that clearly stated that websites were supported. Further, I had explained in detail my current setup with RR and what I wanted to switch it unchanged to ClearWire. I had been assured that there were no technical limitations and that my specific needs were no problem.

Upon hearing that I had a recording, I was asked if the current conversation was being recorded. I said it was, She replied she could not continue if the conversation was being recorded. I reminded her that ClearWire’s announcement stated that the conversation was being recorded. To paraphrase, she said that ClearWire’s recording was OK, but she could not continue if the customer was recording. I did shut off the recording as per her request. However, she just repeated her offer of a $180.00 fee to discontinue service.

We are considering legal action against ClearWire to recoup fees, IT expenses and other costs. We are soliciting input from anyone interested in joining a legal action against ClearWire email: “Clearwire.Action@gmail.com”.

Lee Dilley

By: Ron

Ron — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 00:55:54 +0000

Tell them to stick it. I did, told my credit history people what a bunch of thieves Clearwire is and I has not hurt my credit. They had my contract date incorrect by a month and would not change it to the original date.
When they did that, I canceled the CC I had on file with them as I have 5 others so they didnt get the chance to false bill me. F em..they are a bunch of losers

By: Brandy

Brandy — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 23:32:08 +0000

Clearwire is trying to charge me $180, because I moved to an area that has no service. When I was told when I purchased the modem and the service, that I wuldnt be held liable. F*** CLEARWIRE, DONT GET IT!!!