Testing Clear’s WiMax Internet Service

Parking Garage
Going Underground

Things got interesting when we took the elevator down to the bowels of the building for any wireless ISP’s nightmare test: an underground parking garage. With 42 floors of concrete above and thick slabs on all sides, we were entering a tomb where signals feared to tread. And it showed when we fire up the Clear modem.

Nada. The client searched in vain for minutes and turned up not a thread of signal from above.

But we couldn’t help but notice suit-clad BlackBerry addicts chatting it up on the way to their Benzes. As it turns out, cell phones do work here, and so do 3G modems. We clicked in the AT&T stick for what we expected to be shameful failure, only to turn up one bar that eventually grew to three. It delivered a 0.5 Mbps from SpeakEasy. This isn’t the kind of signal you use you watch movies or stream music, but then again, we’re not the kind of creeps that sit around in parking garages watching YouTube. Gmail opened in a very reasonable amount of time, and the connection provided us just enough bandwidth to do some patient surfing, too.

Where Clear fails, older tech sometimes triumphs.

Car Wash Fountain
Free and Clear

Following the dismal results down below, we headed back up to the surface for some fresh air and pizza beside the so-called Car Wash fountain outside. After degreasing our pepperoni fingers and giving the spray from the fountain a wider berth, we fired up Clear for some post-lunch TV watching.

The signal was, in the words of Clear’s own software, “perfect.” Ten bars. And it screamed. A test on SpeakEasy showed impressive 3.0 Mbps download speeds, and a much more modest 0.5Mbps upload. At this point, it pretty much felt exactly like a hard line, pulling down South Park episodes, Hulu videos, HD content from YouTube and streaming music from Last.fm without breaking a sweat. We would have been content at the fountain side, finishing an episode of The Simpsons in the shade, but in the name of science, we endeavored on.

The MAX
On the Move

…And boarded the MAX. Portland’s light rail system snakes its way through the city and east across the Willamette River, running above ground on the same surface streets as cars. The car and tracks present no challenge for wireless signals, but movement does, so we cracked open the ThinkPad on a train headed north to Portland’s Northeast side, by way of the Steel Bridge. By all indications, Clear has this area saturated in green on its coverage map, but our experience didn’t quite reflect that.

On the way out of downtown, signal seemed to drop from excellent strength outside, to at times as low as one bar when the train began to move. A South Park episode continued to stream without issues for a while, but after a few minutes of flaky signal, the buffer ran out and it began to choke and sputter at times. Not unwatchable, but not perfect, either. The movement itself seemed to be interfering with the signal, since it jumped back up to acceptable levels whenever the train stopped. However, when we got off at a stop only about 10 minutes from where we hopped on, things took a turn for the worse.

North Portland
On the Fringe

The Mississippi/Albina MAX station can’t be called remote by any means – we can practically see it from the office window, and it’s definitely well within Clear’s coverage map. But here, our otherwise stellar Clear signal faded to just one to three bars. A quick SpeakEasy speed test turned up only 0.3 Mbps download speeds and 0.5 Mbps upload speeds, and performance across the Web seemed to reaffirm this. YouTube at standard definition and Last.fm both streamed without stuttering, but higher quality video like 720p content from YouTube and South Park Studios would no longer cut it on our connection. Surfing was also doable, but it lost much of the snappiness we had gotten used to, returning us to speeds that seemed more like a conventional 3G modem. Still it’s worth noting that even with a minimal signal, Clear returned results close to a 3G modem with good signal.

Captain Ankeny’s Bar
Wrapping Up

After wallowing in the crummy coverage out in North Portland for long enough, we hopped a train back to the nexus of Clear connectivity and grabbed a beer at Captain Ankeny’s in downtown Portland. About ten feet away from the window, the modem managed to snag seven bars – enough to comfortably finish the episode of South Park we started on the MAX, without any buffering issues. SpeakEasy delivered about the results we expected from the signal: 1.2 Mbps down and 0.5 Mbps up. One libation later, we hiked back to work to parse some results.

Results and Conclusion

When it comes to maximum download speeds, Clear blows conventional 3G Internet service out of the water. The 3.0 Mbps benchmark speeds and 350 Kbps we managed to pull with torrent files in areas of excellent signal trump anything you can do with a piddly 3G card.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story, either. WiMax signals also fade much more quickly with walls, concrete and other obstructions. The extra speed helps compensate for this, as we noticed when even poor signal delivered 3G-like speed, but in the worst of circumstances, old-school 3G modems will carry a signal when WiMax will not.

Want to connect anywhere and crawl? A 3G modem is still your best bet.

Want to connect most places and fly? Clear makes a lot of sense.

Given that Clear offers both mobile and home Internet service, the real value in the service might be getting both and converging two bills into one. A well-placed Clear router in the home will provide speeds most casual Web surfers would be thrilled with, and the USB modem will do the same (less reliably) on the go – without paying two bills. At the moment, you can get home and mobile service for one $45 a month bill. By contrast, AT&T charges $60 a month for a limited 5GB DataConnect plan – and you’re still going to have to get home Internet somewhere else. We’re obviously neglecting the very limited size of the Clear network right now, but for folks who want to connect around their own towns, and not in the middle of Iowa, Clear makes a very economical solution, and we can only expect service and coverage to get better as the company grows.