Gary Drumm – PMP, ITIL

OK.  Clear’s 4G Wimax is NOT ready for primetime.  It’s probably OK if there are no other options in your area, and getting intermittent access is acceptable for you, but if you’re like me, and you want fast and reliable, then it’s just not going to work out for you.  So I’m dumping 4G for now.

I’m also dumping traditional DSL.  Well, since I’ve had the same DSL line since 1999, I don’t know if I can exactly call it “traditional”, but it was the classic DSL service that started it all.  At any rate, I replaced my Internet access with AT&T’s U-Verse Max Turbo broadband.  For less than the 4G was costing me, and only slightly more than my old DSL, I’m getting 24 mbps download and up to 3mbps upload.  That’s fast!  That’s faster than most of my 802.11 B wireless network can understand, so it actually pegs out around 11 mbps.  Looks like I’ll need to upgrade my infrastructure to support this blistering new speed.

Oh, and to topit all off, the service was installed on Christmas Eve.  I nice little present from the AT&T Santa, though the tech did screw up the phone line in my office, so they’ll have to come back out and fix that next week, but that’s OK.  I’m surfing the web at blistering speeds, and the wife is happy, good enough for me. ;0

Well, I’m happy to report that I finally broke down and bought a USB to VGA adapter for my laptop, allowing me to have two external moitors in addition to my primary laptop monitor, giving me three screens total. I know, I know, it’s not really a big deal, but it is nice to be running two large screens again.  Now I can go back to doing my main work on the larger screens, and use the smaller laptop screen for my iTune playlist.  I’m such a geek.

On another note, the 4G wireless seems to be performing better the last few days.  Good thing too, I guess, since I’d have to cancel the service and return it on Monday if I wanted to avoid an early terminiation fee from Clearwire.

Finally, Anthony and I are going to be working on a couple of electronics projects ove rthe holidays.  We bought an electric cricket kit (a little device that makes really annoying “chirps” when it’s in a dark place,) and micro-recorder kit that allows the user to record a 40 second message and play it back.  We’ll be putting both kits together over the next couple of weeks.  The really cool thing is that both kits require soldering, so I’ll get to teach Anthony how to use this important electronics tool.

Wow!  Holy crap!  What a load of… OK.  So I have the Clear.Com service at home and man can I say that this really sucks!  I am so not impressed with the connectivity, the consistency, or even the speed.  What’s the point of having a broadband service that isn’t always broadband.  I ran a test at one point today and my speed was literally .05 mbps.  That’s 5K!  Are you freaking serious?!!  5K “broadband”.  I might as well bust out with the trusty old 2800 BAUD modem.  So yeah, I guess I’m a little pissed off that this service is SO bad!  I can’t even use this as a backup, even if I did want to fork over $100 for a dual WAN/load balancing router.

And the USB isn’t any better.  I had it connected at work for a couple of hours today then, all of the sudden, it disconnected and couldn’t find a signal again.  I didn’t move the computer.  I wasn’t even touching it at the time.  Just one second it’s on, the next second it’s off and can’t reconnect.

So I’m kind of torn here.  Do I call these guys up and say “Hey, your service REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY sucks and I want my money back!”, or do I give them the benefit of the doubt, since it’s such a new service, and see if they iron out the kinks in the next few days?  Either way, I can’t use them as my primary provider, the service is just too unreliable at this point. I’ll figure out what I want to do in the next couple of days and post my decision here for the whole world to read.

I may just dump AT&T and Clearwire and get Google’s new TiSP service: http://www.google.com/tisp/install.html, I’ll probably get better connectivity than I am now anyway.

OK, so I got the new Clear.Com 4G broadband service for my house… mostly to become my primary Internet connection when my DSL fails, which happens way more than you might think.  Now granted, Clear is just moving into my area, so I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt as to why the service is just so-so.  The plus to the service is that is is considerably faster on downloads, a little over twice to three times as fast, but the uploads are horrible, averaging around 80kbps at the moment.  My DSL was only 1.2 mbps download, but the upload was much faster at around 300kbps, on average.

I guess the coolest thing about the service is that I also got a USB broadband card for my, or my wife’s laptop, as an “emergency” backup… you know, in case the power goes out and we must get online to check our email, or post our latest musings to Facebook.  The problem I’m having with it is that there are apparently no drivers for Windows 7, so I’m having a “little” difficultiy getting it to work at the moment.

All in all, however; I think this service will serve us extremely well.  My next mission is to acquire a dual WAN port router and configure it with load balancing and failover, so if one of my connections goes down, the network will simply route the traffic off of the next port.  That will be pretty sweet for a home setup, and all for less than what oher people pay for AT&T’s U-Verse service… not too bad.