Following weeks of customer complaints regarding allegations of intentional throttling by home users and being told by representatives that Clearwire caps access to 8GB of transfer per week for home service, Clearwire has released an official statement.
“Clearwire maintains a "hands off" approach to managing our network," "we only manage the network to the extent that we have congestion problems," "If we experience network congestion, we are committed to dealing with everyone fairly and we do not target specific applications," "The heaviest of users may give up a small amount of bandwidth so that everybody has a good experience."
The statement does little to explain the weeks of reports from increasingly agitated customers being told by customer service that Clear caps access to 8GB a week and telling customers to limit access to ~1GB of access a day, but the best explanation may lie in the increased popularity of the service. As Clear continues to add more customers, more strain is placed on the cell sites, immediately triggering the measures to control quality of service, which in practice have yet to be properly optimized judging by the complaints of poor service across service plans, as mobile and business customers have also been affected by throttling issues.
No problems with Clear here.
I had nothing but trouble at only 5gigs last week.
I only use at the most 2 to 3 gigs a month. So I hope I will not have problems. So far all is good.
Their ‘hands-off’ approach allows them to individually remove the restriction of the throttle on people’s accounts. Their ‘hands-off’ approach allows them to view individual users who have gotten capped. Their ‘hands-off’ approach allow them to individually set up limits on a per-user/per-mac basis. If this is ‘hands-off’, I’d hate to see what they see as ‘hands-on’.
Congestion problems apparently means ‘if you use more bandwidth than grandma who surfs the web once a week’. Because on towers that are having no load problems, if you still download over a certain cap (say 1-2G a day, or a total of 10G give or take in a month), you get throttled. The tower appears to be unimportant to the throttle hardware (sandvine I believe).
A ‘small portion’ of bandwidth that the ‘heaviest users’ give up is about 98% of their bandwidth. At least that’s what most people will believe when you go from 6-10Mbs down to 0.25Mbs. If that’s a small portion, what’s a large portion? Having them come to your house and hold your modem hostage?
As for ‘dealing with everyone fairly’. Yea, I guess it’s fair that the targetted users get locked in at 0.25Mbs for weeks at a time. I’d hate to see them unfair.
The above are the facts. I’ve yet to see anything but fiction come from Clear.
Their motto should be “step down from dial-up” With dial-up I got a solid 48 kilobytes per sec.
Now that I am rate capped I get about 0.300 MB/sec on their favorite test website speedtest.net but wait there is more. As there is some further limit that knocks actual download from a non-test site to 0.03 or that is to 30 kilobytes per sec.
Even on good days with the highest actual downloads from real site not test site were around 0.5 MB/sec.
The point is don’t trust the “speedtest.nets” of this world as Clear has a way of making them over state
the available download speed.
It would be nice it they’d be honest and state what the actual limits are so I can ration my use.
Though a 7 gig limit per month or per week is immoral for a so-called “unlimited” offering.
As soon as I can afford it, I’ll go to fiber optic which think is a option for me even though I
live on the edge of planet 😉
Clear told me the earth is flat so it must be true…………………………..Dwight
Try calling customer service … 25, 45, one hour waiting time. Can’t even get through to cancel the account!
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