CLEAR performance testing results

Maureen · Site Admin Joined: 20 Aug 2008 Posts: 200

3Gstore (4Ginfo's sister site) has completed testing of CLEAR in Chicago, Austin, and Las Vegas, and were very happy with what we saw! Check out our thoughts and test results here.

If you use CLEAR (either directly from CLEAR or one of the companies that re-sells their service, like Sprint, Comcast, etc etc), post your speedtest results and other thoughts about the service here!

4g Driven · Banned User Joined: 07 Aug 2010 Posts: 2

Want to resell Clear Wimax? Check out this site [url]wix.com/4gdriven/4g[/url]

4gtex · 4G Newbie Joined: 18 Aug 2010 Posts: 4

Clear 4G - Austin TX.
100% Signal (-56 dbm).
15.09Mb/s Download
0.99Mb/s Upload (throttled by Clear)
72ms Ping Latency

Setup:
Modem = Clear / Ubee PXU1900
Antenna = Clear USB Performance Dock (improves signal from 80% to 100%)
4G Router = CTR-500 (1.7.0, 5.2.216)
External AP connected to CTR-500 for better performance.

kfede1 · 4G Newbie Joined: 05 Sep 2010 Posts: 4

I spent roughly 3 hours on the phone with Clear Customer support, mostly repeating the same story over and over again until they all got it. The tower in my neighborhood has some major issues. It seldom works at all, but when it does even give a signal, it has some issue with DNS and can not seem to resolve addresses. The tower is several hundred feet away and a clear line of site, so it is not a range issue. I received 3 different devices, all of which showed the same symptoms. Anyway, I took one of the hots[pots and headed to a different tower to prove to these "Genius"s they needed to fix the tower. (The device worked as advertised for the most part on other towers) There response was that they only had a few complaints thus far. (Of course they probably only have a few customers thus far) Not till there were more complaint would they consider sending someone out. Anyway, they also said they did not work weekends or holidays on the equipment. I am not a huge AT&T fan, but they seem to address issues when they occur very quickly. I can't see Clear making it if they have such a cavalier attitude towards meeting SLAs. I am going to give them a chance to show they can be relied on, but so far I have been w/out Clear services for 3 days. Luckily, I retained my AT&T service.

Finally, I drove out of the neighborhood and tested the signal in other areas marked as 4g in their map Many areas in the map came up as RED (Poor signal) but did work, albeit at slightly better than (old style) modem speeds. As often, I got a Yellow indicator and the throughput was reasonabl, maybe 25% of what was advertised. When I got a green signal near another tower, I hit 9+ megabits down and 900Kb up. That I could live with.

kfede1 · 4G Newbie Joined: 05 Sep 2010 Posts: 4

I spent well over an hour talking to level 1 support today. They closed the ticket I took 3 hours to get open Friday. After being told for over an hour by level 1 that the tower is working and talking to a supervisor for 15 minutes, I finally got level 2 support. They told me that the tower has known issues and it may take several weeks before they intend to address it. The equipment is dropping packets like crazy. I asked why level 1 support has now wasted over 4 of my hours doing things that made no difference and could have been skipped if they just knew the tower was down. He told me that they did not like level 1 to know when the towers were down because they might tell the customers instead of making us go through all this effort. Thank you Clear, thank you Sprint for such considerate use of my time.

BTW, since the repair date for the tower is mid October, I am cancelling Clear.

4gtex · 4G Newbie Joined: 18 Aug 2010 Posts: 4

It does seem to be dependent on the area. I'm in a different area in Austin than my previous post, and even with the exact same equipment setup, and full signal strength (10 bars, 100%, -76dBm), I get consistently much slower speed test results.

Anyone know some keywords when talking to Clear to get them to fix the tower to improve performance?

evdomatt · 4Ginfo Employee Joined: 21 Jun 2010 Posts: 140

4gtex · 4G Newbie Joined: 18 Aug 2010 Posts: 4

evdomatt · 4Ginfo Employee Joined: 21 Jun 2010 Posts: 140

Osage4g · 4G Fledgling Joined: 08 Dec 2009 Posts: 11

The tests that I would rather see would have to come from Clear users that used to be on sprint 3G.

Because that would somewhat answer range to the tower issues if someone had poor performance from Sprint 3G due to a fairly low signal but now get much better results on clear 4G using the exact same tower.

It may not answer the overloaded tower question, because its my understanding a 4G tower can handle more traffic than a 3G tower.

evdomatt · 4Ginfo Employee Joined: 21 Jun 2010 Posts: 140

Osage4g · 4G Fledgling Joined: 08 Dec 2009 Posts: 11

simcity · 4G Newbie Joined: 23 Oct 2010 Posts: 1

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1002181494.png
This speed test was performed in Brooklyn, NY with 4g+ hotspot router.
Clear and Sprint will bring 4g in NYC on November 1