Clear Wimax in Atlanta/Decatur

I am not swimming in beer, but it seems to work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAm2uZC6BQg

I signed up for the home and mobile deal for 3Mbps and the equipment rental for $55 a month ($45 for 3Mbps + $5 for home unit + $5 for USB dongle).  The home account is unlimited, but mobile has a 2GB monthly download limit.  The equipment came in 2 days, and the associate on the phone waived the shipping.

After receiving the equipment I immediately set up the home unit in the window next to my computer and noticed that only one of the 5 LEDs on the top of the unit lit up, indicating that the signal strength was poor.  When I hooked up my desktop computer and restarted networking, the networking was not very fast, and a test using dslreports.com/speedtests indicated I was only getting around 1Mbps initially.  I noticed that some websites like Gmail weren't even working, and got other speed measurements of around 0.5Mbps!

This was a bit disappointing since they told me my address had great signal strength for Clear wimax.  My address is Decatur, GA 30033.

I went from room to room trying the device in all the windows and sometimes would get 2 LEDs to light up.

I tried the USB dongle on my laptop in the living room and found the same fairly poor reception and connection speeds.  I normally use Ubuntu Linux on my laptop, but there are no drivers for Linux for the USB device, and I believe none for Macs either.  At least the connection seemed usable on my laptop.

The next day I took both wimax units to work and tried them there.  Both got very good reception.  The home unit got mostly 5 LEDs, every once in a while hitting 4 LEDs.  I measured speeds of around 4 to 5 Mbps download and around 0.5 Mbps upload.

I tried the USB wimax adapter with my laptop and got almost the same performance.  I tested with both speedtest.net and dslreports.com.

When I returned to my house I tried the home unit in one more window upstairs and was able to get 3 LEDs to light up.  I tested the speed with my laptop and it was about 4 Mbps.

When I went back to my desktop computer I tried once more measuring the speed with my laptop with XP and 1 LED lit up to find it about 1 Mbps.  Then I tried on my desktop with Ubuntu/Linux and found the speed was again 0.5Mbps and not very usable.

At this point I Googled and found that many Linux network configuration don't handle slow speed networks very well.  I was getting speed tests of 6 Mbps or more with Comcast, and even 12 Mbps one time.  After searching I found several configuration settings having to do with window sizes or something that I could change.  I did that and got the speed tests to go up to over 1 Mbps with Clear wimax, and also make the network connection at least usable.

The third day I took the USB dongle and found that there is no Clear wimax in my office in Cobb County.  I didn't try it outside.

I found a 25' CAT5 cable and put the home wiimax modem in the window with 3 LED bars of reception, and measured the speed at 3.59Mbps down, 0.49Mbps up, 94ms ping (speedtest.net).  This looks like what I was hoping for, so now I just have to decide if I want to bother with hiding the CAT5 wire that is running in the hall and down the stairs.

My final decision was to go only with home wimax once they offered to allow me to do month-to-month (no contract).  This means I am paying $30 for the 3 Mbps home service and $5 for the modem, but can cancel at any time.  I decided the mobile wasn't worth it for me since I use Linux a lot and don't do that much mobile computing.