Seven days on a new Internet connection. (Clear)

Okay, first off, I'm not selling anything, endorsing anything, getting kickbacks from anything, or anything else. This is just me getting around a screwed up situation I had no part in making. If this helps someone, great. If not, well, I like to hear myself tal...err...type.

Background: Late last year, my landlord shot out a notice that they would be transitioning my building off Comcast as a cable provider to some place called Suite Solutions. Now my service with Comcast had been pretty fricking good. So I wasn't happy about this. I did some digging on the new provider and was...less than enthused about this change.

My landlord told me that the changeover was happening, no appeals. No changes. Nada. It was either switch over or be disconnected.

The problem was, they sorta failed to...welll...NOTIFY COMCAST.

Cue a 6 month reprieve while lawyers got richer.

Anyhoo, the other shoe dropped at the end of last month when the landlord apparently won in court. Comcast could still provide, but they'd have to put in their own parallel wiring system. As of March 1, I was disconnected and the local Comcast office couldn't provide me with a date for when/if wiring would be laid. The national support number was even worse. Totally and utterly clueless, though with as many markets as they occupy, I can't really blame some wage slave on the other end of the phone.

I'd tried AT&T in the past. I'll just say I was less than thrilled and leave it there. Ma Bell would NOT get another penny from me. And DSL from any other provider would be coming across lines leased from AT&T. And worse, they'd be lines AT&T wouldn't mind losing (aka bad/shoddy lines). I have relatives working in my area who deal with DSL provisioning. So I'm aware of the practices.

Satellite? Can't do it. I'm not allowed to mount an antenna on the building and don't have a balcony to simply place an antenna on.

Tether to my phone? No. I've tried such connections. They're better than dialup or IP over smoke signal. But for gaming? They can be hit-or-miss.

So my other option is one I'd kinda dismissed out of hand a while back. Clear (Clearwire). 4G WiMax (Cellular wireless, 4th Gen). $30/month for the 1MB service. $40/month for the 6GB service.

As my other options were somewhat...limited, I have opted to take a chance on the Clearwire connection.

Day 1:

A quick trip to my local Frys and I was set up with a modem and an account. $118 out the door (lease a modem, are you NUTS?)

Basically when you leave the store, you're already set to connect. No waiting on connection, you're good to hook up when you get home.

I went in and disconnected my now useless cablemodem and replaced it with the Clear modem (Got the 2nd Generation "G" series modem. Apparently the 1st Gen ones are a bit...directional, which can cause problems depending on where you're putting the device.)

I'm getting 2-3 lights (analogous to bars on a phone) most of the time. The manual recommends a minimum of 2 bars.

I rebooted my router and my workstation and boom. Up online.

I played last night with only one nasty random disconnect (wasn't doing anything, just standing in my base gabbing and mapserved). The rest of the time the connection was rock-solid. I even made it through a Rikti invasion on Freedom. Something my cable connection sometimes had a hard time doing.

Ran a couple speedtests. Between 2.5 and 3.5 Mbits down (depending on test server) and over .5 Mbits up on every server I tried. Ping times are in the 80-90ms range, which is just fine. The T1 I'm abusing right now is pulling 35-45ms for the same site at a slightly less-busy time of day.

About the only thing that threw me was one little piece of sub-optimal routing. I tried tracing back to CoH.com. My ISP's peering point is out on the West coast and hops around 8 times in that area before traveling all the way across the country to Maryland and then back to Arizona before disappearing into the Limelight (llnw) network. I don't often see these kinds of "out and back" traversals anymore. Maybe I'm just spoiled...

Worst I ever saw was a 35 hop run that crossed the country 15 times before hitting the other endpoint that was 3 miles from me.

Had one person horror-story me a bit about what might happen. But my first impression has, thus far, been excellent. They did admit that with Chicago being one of their latest rollouts, the amount of deal-breaker problems they encountered was far lower. It also probably helps that Chicago is relatively flat with a massive infrastructure already built up for this sort of thing.

One other nifty thing. If I travel to another location that has coverage, I should be able to take the modem (technically a gateway device) with me and have Internet. Unfortunately, the two cities I visit most frequenty don't have coverage yet, but I can hope!

Note: I didn't opt for the mobile broadband in addition to the home service. I don't travel enough to make

Anyone else had any experiences with Clear they want to share? Good? Bad? Indifferent?

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