Clearwire: Just Say No

[Tom Marshall]

I have just had the most awful experience with Clearwire and I wanted to
warn others on this list just in case they were considering signing up for
it.

I figured it would be cool to get wireless broadband for a reasonable price
so I tried to sign up via their website.  That didn't work -- the website
did not allow me to sign up with my address, even though addresses as close
as two blocks away in any direction did work.

So I called up clearwire sales.  The sales rep ran into the same issue so he
entered my work address into the system in order to let him make the sale. 
In retrospect, this should have been a big warning sign, but I didn't think
anything of it at the time.

I'm a firm believer in providers being providers and staying out of the
firewall business, so one of the very first questions I asked was whether
they blocked any ports at all.  The sales guy was very nice and upfront and
said he didn't know, so he transferred me to tech support.  The tech support
rep assured me that no, they don't block any ports at all on their side.

Once I received the modem, I plugged it in and was unable to get a strong
signal.  I spent quite a long time walking around my house waving a modem
around in the air like a dork but the best I could get was a marginal
signal.  I've made several calls to tech support and they all say that I'm
well within range of at least two towers (about 0.25 miles to either) and
they just can't understand why my signal is so bad.  Today (two weeks later)
they finally decided that they can't fix the problem over the phone and they
actually have to send someone out to my house.  So sometime in the next
three days I'll have the added inconvenience of scheduling a time to miss
work so I can let a technician into my house and wave another modem around
in the air.  If he can't get a good signal, they may want to mount a modem
outside my house and that's sure to be another uphill battle (I'm not keen
to put holes in my house to support a crappy service with technicians that
lie to me in order to make a sale).

Meanwhile, I went out and purchased a Linksys WIP300 and tried to get it to
work with the marginal clearwire service.  I spent all night trying to get
it to place calls but was unsuccessful.  Yesterday, I was at Racha in Queen
Anne and I noticed they had free WiFi.  So I decided to give the phone a try
there.  Worked like a charm.  Next I tried from work.  Again, it worked
great.  So I went home last night and did some investigation.  I did some
monitor-mode packet captures using my laptop while I tried to place calls
with the phone.  The SIP packets were going out but nothing was coming back. 
So I figured maybe my wireless router (a WRT54G) was at fault.  I tried
everything to get it to work -- everything failed.

So I figured I'd call clearwire support to see if they could resolve the
issue.  The tech support rep immediately told me that they block all ports
but that customers can request ports be opened.  But, I explained, the first
tech support rep said that there was no port blocks on the service.  He said
that was "not the truth" -- I had been lied to in order to make a sale.  So
in order to open the VoIP ports (that I am paying for, that should be opened
anyway, and that I was told would be open when I signed up), I need to fill
out a request that includes detailed information about what application I
plan to use, why I need it, and so forth.  Then the request goes up to the
next level and some anonymous network manager gets to decide whether my
request is acceptable.  If they do choose to allow the requested ports,
their policy is to open the ports within six (6) business days.  Yes, that
is more than a full week.

So if you are planning on getting clearwire, make sure that (1) you get a
GOOD STRONG signal, and (2) you don't need to use it for anything but web
browsing -- VoIP, VPNs, and anything else that your average AOLer doesn't
use on a regular basis are subject to filtering and the whims of their
network managers.

If the "technician" that shows up at my door next week can actually get the
modem to provide a clean signal, I get the privilege of setting up an
encrypted tunnel to a server outside the reach of clearwire's idiotic
firewall policies in order to get access to arbitrary IP traffic that have
already paid for.  Obviously I'm hoping that he can't fix it and I can go
find a provider that isn't so unfriendly to the tech savvy community.

-- 
Innovate, v.: To annoy people.