6 months with Clear. (Internet Connection)

For reference, my original thread.

Okay, never ever thought I'd be saying this. But next week my AT&T DSL connection goes active. HURRAH!

*Yes, I just felt my soul shrivel up a bit.*

Anyhoo, I'm due to get off my Wireless Internet provider next week once the DSL line goes active (as Clear can't proactively schedule an account for termination).

The last 6 months have been something of a love-hate relationship with this connection. When it worked, it worked NICE. Everything was fast, gaming was stable, and all was right with the world. My VOIP phone that I use for work was even semi decent.

However, just under a month after I'd picked up my equipment, I was having massive connection stability issues. The modem was resetting three, four times a day. Where I'd been getting 2-3 green bars, I was getting one (and corresponding "I wish I had dialup" speeds). And even when the modem wasn't resetting or having low signal, I'd be dropping connections. And my VOIP situation was so bad I quite literally had to stop working from home at all (imagine talking to someone and getting every third syllable of every other word).

First they traced it to the fact that I was connecting to a tower 4 miles south of me, rather than the tower 1/4 mile north of me. Well, I AM on the south face of my apartment complex, more or less in the middle of the wall. So I have all that brick and concrete and steel between me ant the closer tower. Even when they could force me onto the closer one, I'd usually drop off by the next morning.

Then they traced it to the original modem and swapped it out. No change.

I've been making monthly calls (simply because dealing with it was aggravating enough that I didn't want to call more). While the techs and sales reps were always unfailingly polite and attempted to be helpful, it never got my problems resolved, even with multiple visits to the nearby tower to check it out.

I'd get a "reset your modem". Which I'd do, and which would clear it up for a little while (an hour or two). After which it was the same story all over again. And I should NOT be having to reboot my modem multiple times a day just to get dependable internet.

Recently it's gotten so bad that I've wound up having to refresh webpages 3-4 times just to get them to load properly. My netflix account for watching video online has been completely unusable.

So, today, after 6 months of biting the bullet, I finally threw in the towel. I called AT&T and ordered a dry pair that should go active next Wednesday or Thursday. As soon as the connection's up and running I'm calling to have Clear shut down my service.

Now, to be fair, Clear has busted their *AHEM* trying to get my problems resolved. Moreover, they HAVE been faithfully documenting every problem. When the sales tech I talked to today found out that I was canceling, she was able to pull up the entirety of my service history. And she even went a step further and waived the early termination fees (Clear is set up like a wireless phone carrier, you sign a 2 year contract, and have a 30-day window in which to cancel normally, after which you pay a portion of your total contract value to get out).

Honestly, were it not for the fact that the connection doesn't meet my day-to-day requirements, I'd have seriously thought about keeping it or converting over to the mobile Internet plan for when I travel (rather than paying donkey-molesting fees for hotel internet).

In-game, most of the time the connection was fine. I was able to handle ship raids, hami raids, Rikti Invasions, and even the anniversary event just fine. But every few days (sometimes multiple times in the same day) I'd have to pull the plug on the router and reset it because I was lagging so hard I'd mapserv.

All in all, Clear was an interesting and conscientious provider with lots of potential. Unfortunately, they were not the provider I needed them to be.

I'd inquired with Comcast to see if there was any movement to install a parallel network into my building so I could head back to them as an Internet provider. The response I got was a lot of mealy-mouthed "I dunno", which is essentially a "no".

So, dialup or DSL.

So I pick DSL.

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