I was really excited about clearwire coming to NYC. Months before I tracked the progress of their cell towers. Their first tower was only a few blocks away from me so I knew I would get excellent signal. After months of delay, Clear finally launched their service on November 1.
So off I go to the Clear store on Broadway and 17th Street. I spoke to the sales guy who had a nice pitch about the great download speed, and all the benefits of the combo program that gave me a home modem and a hotspot router.
I installed the home router within a few minutes, most of it was plug and play. With exception on the password for the router was incorrectly printed in the manual, everything was super easy. I was happy.
Then I tried to play some Modern Warfare 2 on my PS3. FAIL. Immediately I noticed that I was having trouble joining some games and on the games I joined, it would time out. The problem rests in the ping response of the connection. Although the download speed was fine ( 3.5Mbps) my ping response was in the >130ms range.
I logged in the Clear support forum and saw that this is the biggest complaint from the Clear customers. The slow ping time is unusable for online gaming. The second most reported issue is with watching streaming videos. Clear immediately punish you for what they consider overuse, which is not much more than watching a couple of movies through Netflix or AppleTV.
My Netflix experience was terrible. The video was blocky and it constantly stopped to cache the content.
Clearwire offers a 14 day guarantee to cancel your contract. Notice that they are not offering you to refund all your money, only a portion of what you don’t use for the month. I’m calling today to cancel.
Update:
When I called to cancel, they first told me they would charge $40 restocking fee for each item. I informed them that I am within my trial period and that according to the website there would not be a restocking fee. The salesperson then agreed and said they would email me a shipping label. My refund is $72.51, roughly $10 less than what I paid. They sent me an email confirming my cancellation, but as of yet, no label.