As of Wednesday, March 14, 2007 - approximately 3:10 PM Pacific Daylight Time, I am a functioning Clearwire customer from my home in Woodinville, Washington (a suburb of Seattle, just North of Redmond).
It's good to actually be using Broadband Wireless Internet Access service once again.
I purchased my Clearwire service at Clearwire's retail store in downtown Woodinville, Washington over-the-counter. I am a retail customer, paying full price (and then some, but that's for a future post), with no "Press" benefits or other discounts or special deals or treatment from Clearwire.
In upcoming posts, I'll be detailing my real-world experiences with the purchase, setup, and usage of Clearwire, as well as analyzing the bigger picture of Clearwire's activities and its role in the greater Broadband Wireless Internet Access / WiMAX industry.
Here are some of my initial experiences as an ordinary Clearwire customer:
- Upon purchase, make sure your Clearwire modem doesn't rattle. The modem I was
initially given had a broken power jack - the power jack was loose
inside the case of the modem - clearly defective. Upon discovering this
as I was trying to install it, I took it back to the Clearwire
retail store that I had purchased it from less than an hour before and
I was simply handed a new modem; my salesperson handled the change of
serial number. Also... there are apparently more than one model of
modem with different power jacks. The modems on display at the Clearwire store had smaller power jacks than the second
unit that I was given.
- The modem certainly does work through trees - surprisingly so given that Clearwire is operating on 2.5 GHz. The second (working) Clearwire modem synched up immediately (solid 4 bars within the 30 seconds between plugging in power and Ethernet under the desk and settling back into the chair.) I suspect my signal path is shooting from my house on the side of a hill, across a valley, to a Clearwire base station at the top of a ridge on the far side of the valley - perhaps three miles (which I'll verify soon with my GPS receiver.)
- The Clearwire modem doesn't seem to be an IP router capable of giving multiple IP addresses, at least in the retail version of the service. Previously, my office used a 4 port 100 Mbps switch under my desk. The DSL modem and router in the basement was plugged into the Upstream port of the switch, and my Mac Mini and a network laser printer were connected to two of the four Downstream ports. I disconnected the Ethernet line from the DSL router and plugged in the Ethernet line from the Clearwire modem, and I could not connect to the Internet. I'm guessing what happened is that the network laser printer "grabbed" the single IP address that the Clearwire modem made available, and the Mac Mini retained its non-routable address which the Clearwire modem wouldn't deal with. To be fair, from what I've seen of the Clearwire literature, and overhearing a sales rep deal with another customer, Clearwire tells you to plug the modem directly into the computer, which I'm sure works fine... for those rare households these days that only have one computer. If you want to use mulitple computers... that's probably up to you to figure out, and over the next few days I'll be reconfiguring my home network to use the Clearwire modem as primary Internet.
- Trying the first speed test that came up on Google, Speakeasy, Seattle, Washington resulted in 3.367 Mbps download, 310 Kbps upload speeds. If accurate... nice (though the Clearwire service doesn't feel twice as fast as 1.5 Mbps DSL.)
By Steve Stroh
This article is Copyright © 2007 by Steve Stroh