Update: Clear 4G Wireless

I know a lot of you reading our articles are gadget geeks as much as Greg and I are, so I thought I'd give you an update on my experience with CLEAR 4G wireless.

As long-time readers will know, Clear launched in Las Vegas, Portland, and Atlanta this summer. They're now in 27 markets, primarily markets where Spring (who owns 51% of Clear) has a pre-WiMax 4G presence (XOHM), and is converting those old customers. At the launch, I noted how Clear was delivering reliable 6Mbps service at the launch site, a shopping mall near my home - but that I was only getting 1Mbps service at home, about a mile away. Clear's service is highly dependent on distance from the tower, not unlike DSL. 

Fast forward a few months. Clear resellers - like the kiosk at the aforementioned mall - have access to an app that shows actual tower locations. So every so often, I stop by and check things out. Recently, I discovered that a couple of towers were now bracketing my house. Well, a friend had just bought Clear and was happy with it, so I borrowed his router/modem and brought it over to the house. Some experimentation led me to discover that a high shelf in the garage, of all places, was getting 4-5 bars of signal! Fortunately, the garage has Ethernet cabling (hey, built the house - every room has cabling), so I could easily put the modem there.

Right now, Clear is offer a killer deal: A home wireless modem and a mobile USB modem, both with independent unlimited service, both at the 6Mbps rate (bursts to 10), for $50/month total - for life. I pay that now for my Spring 3G modem. Sure, Clear isn't fully national yet - but it will be by the end of 2010; they're rolling to over 40 markets total this year. I'm willing to deal with spotty out-of-town service in exchange for a sweet lifetime price. So I took the plunge. Clear offers a 7 day money-back guarantee, so I figured I'd try it.

Right now, I still have the Spring 3G service - my contract runs through June, so I'll keep it until then. But I'm reliably getting 3-4Mbps service at my house, which is what my CenturyLink DSL line was delivering. Now, I can cancel DSL. Saving me $40 a month.

It's always irritated me that CentryLink's cheapest phone line is like $20 a month - you can't get anything but a bundle of features, and the only thing I use the landline for these days is my home's alarm system. My new insurance agent (don't even get me started on the necessity of shopping your insurance coverage every few years - I'm saving 50% now) suggested a different local security monitoring company. Turns out he can convert my alarm system to wireless monitoring and charge me $9 less per month than my existing landline monitoring. Boom, $9/mo savings, drop the phone line for $20/mo savings - I'm up to almost $80/mo now by switching to clear.

So I call Century Link. Right now, they bill me for my Dish Network service, and I wanted that unbundled and sent back to Dish, since I'll be dropping everything else from Century Link. Dish looks at my service and tells me they've re-jiggered their bundles, so I can drop the $10/mo "Platinum HD" add-on because I'll get those channels free anyway. $90/mo savings. That's like a pretty decent dinner out once a month!

Two weeks on Clear now, and I'm delighted with it. There are a couple of downsides: The Motorola CPE is a very simple device. Two plugs: Ethernet and power. Not even an external antenna port, which was kinda stupid. It also can't operate in "bridge" mode - it's only a router. So that kills my ability to use the "Back to My Mac" feature of my iMac, because that feature depends on my actual Airport Extreme having a real IP address; right now I'm essentially doing double NAT. That's okay - I've recently switched to a laptop, so I don't need Back to My Mac as much, and for the other iMac in the house we can use GoToMyPC or LogMeIn if we decide we need the remote access capability.

The only other downside is that I had an old CradlePoint PHS-300 portable hotspot. You plug a USB 3G/4G modem into it, and it turns that into a WiFi hotspot. Very convenient for hooking up 2-3 computers in an airport or hotel room. The PHS-300 has a battery and is good for 2-3 hours of runtime, even. Well, Clear offers a branded version of this thing, and CradlePoint has firmware upgrades, so I thought "awesome - I can use my existing PHS-300 with my new Clear USB modem!" Er, no - you need the v2 hardware and I only have v1.1 hardware. So the old PHS-300 is up for sale on eBay, and I'll pick up a new one when and if I decide I need it. 

Neat fact: Clear advertises their USB modem as working with Mac 10.5, but not the latest 10.6 Snow Leopard; their support page, however, has a driver listed as compatible with 10.6 and I can assure you it works perfectly. It also works with Windows 7, if you're interested. So I can use the USB modem directly on all of my laptops, which makes a new portable hotspot less of a priority.

It's a little tough to get used to a town that's literally blanketed in DSL-grade wireless. Interestingly, while Clear and Sprint are leading the charge on this (Sprint's 4G service is just Clear, repackaged under the Sprint or Nextel brand), 4G is the first "converged" wireless standard, meaning that when Verizon and AT&T and everyone roll it out, it'll be the same technology. It's also the same technology overseas, leading to great opportunities for spending vast sums of money to roam :).

Oh, and for all you cable broadband folks - yeah, I get it, 10Mbps or more to your desktop. We don't have cables in the ground where I live, though, so it is literally not an option. Nor do we have FiOS, because we're not a Verizon region. My choices are literally 5Mbps DSL or 5-6Mbps Clear. I don't even live close enough to a CO to get CenturyLink's 10Mbps DSL service, or I might well have that instead of Clear.