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 I decided to take the plunge, since I was so tired of dealing with Comcrap..errr, I mean Comcast. For the past three months Clear sales people have been wedging flyers in front doors in my neighborhood. I decided to give one of their sales persons a call. Later that day a nice young man, a recent graduate of Auburn, showed up at my door with the equipment. Everything seemed pre-ordained since the tower that the Clear network was operating off of was in sight and when we were finished setting up the Wifi modem all the indicators were lit up indicating maximum signal strength.
Though I was excited I was still not ready to turn sever my cable modem ties. So the salesman agreed to leave the equipment in demo mode so I could really put the system through its paces over the next day or so. Things seemed “so far so good” for a while. There was a slight delay when loading webpages when compared to Comcast, but I initially trumped it up to the server that housed my website. When I tried loading webpages on my laptop using my local wireless network, I noticed the same delay. But once the webpage was loaded, everything was pretty much smooth sailing. Loading videos off of Youtube and other media sites also took a noticeably longer time to load (the load bar crept across the screen at about half the pace when compared to Comcast). Once enough of a video was loaded the content played fine. I just made a mental note that when it came to a popular video or if for any reason my connection slowed down, I would probably run into issues where the playback of the video could outpace the download time.
Again, with Netflix streaming through my Xbox 360, the preload time took significantly longer than it did when compared to the cable modem. After a couple of minutes, playback would begin and content would play back fine. Now if I was working off two machines (or took a phone call on a VoIP system) problems crept in. On Netflix, the streaming content would adjust because the bandwidth had changed. On the VoIP phone (I use Vonage) some distortion occurred. During the course of my demo, I kept checking the signal strength on the Clear modem – all five lights remained lit. If I stayed to once machine at a time, I didn’t have these problems.
Gaming. This is where the deal breaker occurred. As you know from the commercials, once of Clear’s selling points is that the connection is supposed to be so fast that you should have no problem gaming online. When I tried creating an XBL party and have a friend in Raleigh, NC connect to me, the connection would time out. If I tried to connect to him, it would also time out. My friend in Raleigh has DSL through Verizon. Could it be that Clear would not play nice with DSL? If I could not join an XBL party, joining a two player campaign in ODST created by either of us was not possible. My NAT settings were fine since XBL’s network diagnostics did not indicate a problem with these settings.
So I moved onto connecting to a friend of mine in Houston who has DSL through AT&T and supposedly his connection is a new generation of DSL. I was able to connect to his XBL party and vice versa. When he or I created an ODST match we were both able to connect to either one’s game, but neither of us had enough time on our hands to play for an extended period of time.
I did a little research into online gaming and bandwidth. Turns out the part that matters isn’t the download speed, but the upload speed. With Clear, my connection was averaging just under 500kpbs. With online gaming an upload speed of 500kps+ is required, but for a lag free experience, higher is preferred (in case you’re wondering, my download speed averaged under 6 Mbps). With Comcast, download was around 15 Mbps (Comcast claims that this is achieved through”speedboost”). The upload speed was around 5 MBps – awesome for gaming.
So, there are the pros and cons. With Comcast, if you just have the Cable Modem, its going to cost you around $60 per month (I own my own equipment). Clear will cost you the about the same if you sign up for the home + mobility package and you rent the equipment (the wifi modem and wireless dongle for your laptop rent for $4.99 per month, the service is $49). According to what the Clear sales person told me, signing a contract for a year will lock you into this rate for a year, so if there is a rate increase, you won’t see it until after 12 months). You can be a month to month customer, but your rate is not guaranteed.
These are my feelings. If you’re NOT a power user, Clear could be a great value to you since you do get the wireless dongle and you don’t have to worry about a crappy connection at your local coffee shop. The performance is comparable to, if not better than DSL (depends on what tier of DSL you’ve used). Clear is ideal for someone who wants an online connection and pretty much surfs the web and maybe occasionally watches streaming content. Maybe at most two devices using Clear in your home and you would not notice much of a difference when compared to DSL. Maybe you can use it for gaming (running one device), but lag could issue.
If you are a power user, chances are you’re going to have problems with Clear. Let me clarify what a power user is: you use multiple devices on one broadband connection simultaneously (phone, more than one PC, game consoles, VoIP), you do a significant amount of downloading/uploading, and if you like hosting games or running a dedicated server. If this is the case then this service is not for you.
At this point in time, I find that for my purposes, nothing beats a good ‘ol wired, coaxial connection (the guy remarked that my setup is the most advanced he’s seen yet). Maybe in the future when Clear’s bandwidth increases, only then could I see myself being free of Comcast.
-ZQ
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