So in December when moving, I opted to snag a wireless modem on Clear’s 4G internet service. Tested it for a couple days and was getting reasonable speed in the 3Mbps range both at the old place in NYC and in the new one in Jersey and figured it was about as fast as the cable connection I’d had for years in the east village so I could live with it.
Then, in January there were a couple of outages on the network. And then, I noticed it’s been getting slower and slower. So bad that sometimes while trying to watch something on Netflix it stutters, stops and has to take up to a minute to rebuffer and reload video. I didn’t notice this so much during February since I was mainly working on the Spike.com relaunch and would get all kinds of problems accessing the dev and QA sites plus JIRA was really unstable and half the time wouldn’t load for anyone. Now that the new site has launched and I’ve had a week of not triaging the issues I’ve been able to notice EVERYTHING runs painfully slow. At that point I decided to visit Clear’s website and found many tales of horror from users who are in an uproar over Clear purposely throttling down the network speeds when you’re doing the very things they claimed you could do with their service (video streaming, etc.)
Yet still, they are out in force recruiting as many new users as they possibly can. In looking into it, I came across a gem on the Wall St. Journal that they were running out of money and were not going to have enough cash to continue operations through the entirety of this year without an additional infusion of funding because they’re not profitable yet. By December they had averted the crisis by issuing $1.1B (yes, that’s BILLON) in public debt (incidentally it’s pretty much junk rated) to continue operations and they’ve been on a spree to acquire new customers now that they’re starting to hemorrhage existing customers who are fed up with their service caps as bait and switch/false advertising.
Now, I’ve come across this nugget of goodness: http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2011/03/wimax-throttling-lawsuit-clearwire-cant-deliver-the-goods.ars
For the past week and a half I’ve been struggling with the speed of the connection and when I run speed tests at home I see around 300k of throughput during the best of times. Trying to get through an episode of Stargate SG1 on Netflix has become a joke because the video stutters at least every few minutes and the video quality keeps downgrading to try and deal with the connection speed.
So Saturday night I was fed up, pissed about them throttling me on a service they claimed had no throttling and no usage caps and decided to go with the devil I know, Verizon FIOS that should be installed and working by Wednesday afternoon. One thing I do know is at least Verizon is usually up front with their policies and what they’re doing…Clear on the other hand are just a bunch of scumbag, lying fuckers who deserve to go under for their scam.
I’ve heard read some horror stories of long hold times and the CSR’s being scripted to do anything it takes to get you off the phone without letting you cancel your service, even going so far as to hang up on people. Luckily I opted for buying the modem outright since it wasn’t that expensive (<$100) and went on a month to month service agreement with them in case I decided it wasn’t workable and needed to upgrade to FIOS. Well, here I am, it’s not workable and I’m upgrading to FIOS. I wonder what stunts their CSRs are going to try and pull when I call on Wednesday to cancel my service and whether I’ll have to get Amex involved in cutting them off since they direct bill to my card. In the meantime, if that lawsuit turns into a class action suit while it’s nice to think I could get in on the action, considering how in debt Clear is and on the verge of going under anyway I’m doubtful anyone could get much of anything back out of them for this bullshit.
FUCK YOU CLEAR! FUCK YOU RIGHT IN THE EAR! MOTHERFUCKING SCUMBAG SCAMARTISTS!!!
Ah, I think I feel a little better now.