[NovaCrystallis]

Just ran speedtest.net again and this is what I got



It seems like it has the capability of delivering what they're advertising. However the most important thing to me is how fast the pages load up and the ability to switch from page to page without a ridiculous amount of delay.

So hopefully the Clear rep who comes out here today can fix/alleviate that issue.

[jess101]

morgan1112 - Heatherwilde and 45! You didn't happen to go to the Best Buy in Pflugerville and see CLEAR being demo'd did you? That would be funny, cuz that's where I went when I saw the low signal on their home modem.

I can't post a tower map (non-disclosure and stuff) but I can tell you there is a tower at Red Bud across from the HEB at Gattis School that is 1.2 miles directly north of 45 and Heatherwilde. There is another tower on Preim Lane close to 130 that is 1.5 miles from that intersection. Your location should be in great shape, as the closest tower to me is the one on Preim and it is 1.8 miles from my place.

Looks like upload speeds are starting to come up. I've been checking and watching them get better. Here's this morning's results:



This speed test was done on my laptop connected through Wi-Fi first, and then out through the CLEAR modem. You should just have me come over and demo at your place, as it seems you live just up the street from me.

[NovaCrystallis]

Originally Posted by jess101

morgan1112 - Heatherwilde and 45! You didn't happen to go to the Best Buy in Pflugerville and see CLEAR being demo'd did you? That would be funny, cuz that's where I went when I saw the low signal on their home modem.

I can't post a tower map (non-disclosure and stuff) but I can tell you there is a tower at Red Bud across from the HEB at Gattis School that is 1.2 miles directly north of 45 and Heatherwilde. There is another tower on Preim Lane close to 130 that is 1.5 miles from that intersection. Your location should be in great shape, as the closest tower to me is the one on Preim and it is 1.8 miles from my place.

Looks like upload speeds are starting to come up. I've been checking and watching them get better. Here's this morning's results:



This speed test was done on my laptop connected through Wi-Fi first, and then out through the CLEAR modem. You should just have me come over and demo at your place, as it seems you live just up the street from me.

Do you work for Clear/WiMax?

Just curious

As for phone don't worry about that. As soon as I plugged one of the phones into the Clear Voice it automatically hooked up all the other phones. I haven't ported my number over yet though.

Still trying it out.

I spoke with the guy who signed me up and he said to go to home.clear.com to look at the settings and tinker with them. Is that correct? Sorta like how linksys you go to 192.168.1.1?

Lastly he said that by Dec. 1st the whole network should running on all cylinders. Also he mentioned latency could be the reason for the loading up of pages being slow. Right now it seems to trend towards 70-100 ms latency.

Is that good? I don't know how much it was TWC....

However he said that they're in the process or changing 20 "clearwire" towers into full operational "Clear/WiMax" towers. Hopefully that will fix that issue.

Is there anything you suggest Jess that will allow my network to load the internet webpages faster though? Like should I disable DHCP on the router or on the Clear Modem and Clear Voice? And what should I do about the NAT that you were referring to?

[jess101]

Do you work for Clear/WiMax?

No, but I am an authorized retailer and offer CLEAR as part of my VoIP business portfolio.

I spoke with the guy who signed me up and he said to go to home.clear.com to look at the settings and tinker with them. Is that correct? Sorta like how linksys you go to 192.168.1.1?

You'll have to google that one. I can't offer up "the" method of getting into your CLEAR modem. You won't get to it by going to home.clear.com though.

Is there anything you suggest Jess that will allow my network to load the internet webpages faster though? Like should I disable DHCP on the router or on the Clear Modem and Clear Voice? And what should I do about the NAT that you were referring to?

Without knowing how your rep set you up, I can't really offer any good advice on what you need to do to speed up web page loading. I would hope that your rep at least turned off the DHCP in your Linksys wireless router if he didn't turn it off in the CLEAR modem. It would be interesting to know how he set you up, but until you look at the settings in both your Linksys router, and the CLEAR modem/router, it would be tough to tell you where to go from here. Plug one of your computers directly into the CLEAR modem with an ethernet cable and see if your page loading improves to any degree.

[NovaCrystallis]

No "rep" set me up...

I did it all by myself. Here's my connection pathway now.

Clear Modem --> Clear Voice --> Linksys Router

I know the Linksys Router has DHCP enabled.

Which do you think is better? To have the router have DHCP or the modem?

[NovaCrystallis]

Any suggestions?

[jess101]

No "rep" set me up...

I did it all by myself. Here's my connection pathway now.

Clear Modem --> Clear Voice --> Linksys Router

I know the Linksys Router has DHCP enabled.

Which do you think is better? To have the router have DHCP or the modem?

I took my set up and duplicated yours (following CLEAR instructions). I plugged the CLEAR home modem cable directly into the internet connection of the phone ATA, and a cable from the ATA ethernet connection directly into the WAN/Internet connection of a Linksys WRT54GL wireless router. Prior to doing this, I reset ALL modem and router settings to factory default. This was a brand new WRT54GL router with updated Linksys firmware. I have not flashed this router with dd-wrt software as I normally would.

I did not notice any appreciable slow down in web browsing performance with this set up compared to my previous set up. Double NAT can cause some issues in some areas, but it is not usually a big problem for just web surfing. I compared the CLEAR service with my SuddenLink service to see how long it took for a page on a website to completely render (shows "Done" in bottom of web browser). Either service took about the same amount of time.

My suggestion would be to plug one of your laptops or desktop computer directly into the ethernet port of the Clear modem. See if this make a difference. This will remove all possibility of slow downs due to multiple NAT, DHCP processes. If you see about the same results, now you have to try and determine why, assuming you were seeing faster page loads with your old service on the same computer. Did you purchase any security software with your Clear service? Security software can slow things down also.

[NovaCrystallis]

Originally Posted by jess101

I took my set up and duplicated yours (following CLEAR instructions). I plugged the CLEAR home modem cable directly into the internet connection of the phone ATA, and a cable from the ATA ethernet connection directly into the WAN/Internet connection of a Linksys WRT54GL wireless router. Prior to doing this, I reset ALL modem and router settings to factory default. This was a brand new WRT54GL router with updated Linksys firmware. I have not flashed this router with dd-wrt software as I normally would.

I did not notice any appreciable slow down in web browsing performance with this set up compared to my previous set up. Double NAT can cause some issues in some areas, but it is not usually a big problem for just web surfing. I compared the CLEAR service with my SuddenLink service to see how long it took for a page on a website to completely render (shows "Done" in bottom of web browser). Either service took about the same amount of time.

My suggestion would be to plug one of your laptops or desktop computer directly into the ethernet port of the Clear modem. See if this make a difference. This will remove all possibility of slow downs due to multiple NAT, DHCP processes. If you see about the same results, now you have to try and determine why, assuming you were seeing faster page loads with your old service on the same computer. Did you purchase any security software with your Clear service? Security software can slow things down also.

But what about the DHCP thats enabled on both the router and the clear mode thats made by motorola?

According to everywhere I look on the internet having DHCP enabled on both devices is not good and that I should disable it for one of the devices.

Now you're saying to plug in 1 of my computers directly into the clear modem. Can't I also plug it directly into the linksys router?

EDIT: I just went ahead and disconnected the wireless connection. I then got an extra ethernet cable and plugged the desktop pc directly into the linksys router (WRT610N).

I check connection status and it says 1Gbps.

So I opened up Firefox and tried surfing a few pages. I went to IGN (cuz I like games a lot) and it's still taking forever. Right now it's just green with the banner at the top.

[jess101]

EDIT: I just went ahead and disconnected the wireless connection. I then got an extra ethernet cable and plugged the desktop pc directly into the linksys router (WRT610N).

To really get to the bottom of your problem, you need to remove all possible variables first, and then start adding them back a little at a time to see if any of them make a difference. Plug one of your computers directly into the Clear Modem and try surfing that way. This removes any issues you might be experiencing by having a phone ATA and a 2nd router in the mix. Worry about the double NAT and DHCP later.

Try surfing many websites. That IGN website took about 10 seconds to completely load on my SuddenLink connection. It may be more the websites you are visiting than your connection speed or latency. If you're still slow after hooking directly to the Clear modem, try running some tracert commands to see which hops are slow.

Did you add internet security software with your Clear service?

[LJA]

this just needs to get rolled out to more places to shake it down.

[NovaCrystallis]

Originally Posted by jess101

To really get to the bottom of your problem, you need to remove all possible variables first, and then start adding them back a little at a time to see if any of them make a difference. Plug one of your computers directly into the Clear Modem and try surfing that way. This removes any issues you might be experiencing by having a phone ATA and a 2nd router in the mix. Worry about the double NAT and DHCP later.

Try surfing many websites. That IGN website took about 10 seconds to completely load on my SuddenLink connection. It may be more the websites you are visiting than your connection speed or latency. If you're still slow after hooking directly to the Clear modem, try running some tracert commands to see which hops are slow.

Did you add internet security software with your Clear service?

Not that I know of. I just signed up for Clear Internet and Clear Voice and that's it.

Is there any name for the internet security software? That way I can know what it's called and if it was mentioned to me? And why does it matter?


I see your point however about removing all variables so as soon as i get a chance I'm gonna hook up my laptop to the Clear modem from Motorola DIRECTLY to see what happens and if load times are still the same.

Here are a list of websites I visit.

www.cnn.com
www.cnet.com
www.cw.com
www.ign.com
www.blu-ray.com

Out of thsoe I'll agree that IGN sometimes takes a while to load up. Still though I switched the linksys router back to the TWC modem to compare speeds and while the download/upload is horrible compared to Clear as I mentioned above the latency/ping time is significantly smaller.

Also www.ign.com loaded up a lot faster. Probably half the time it took when I was connected thru Clear.

[NovaCrystallis]

That's what I'm getting with my laptop plugged DIRECTLY into the Clear Modem.

The latency once again is in the 100's range.

The webpages are loading a lil faster (a noticeable difference than when I was connected wirelessly thru the Linksys Router.

However it's still just a tad bit slower than when my laptop was connected wirelessly thru the Linksys Router to TWC's network.

Anyways let me know what you think. Like I said earlier I understand that the Clear network is like a newborn baby that has barely just got started in the world so I'm willing to give it some time. However I'd like to know that they are working on getting that latency issue fixed and as low as their competitors.

[wimaxsatx]

My name is Lee, and I'm one of them new Authorized Retailers, but I'm further south in the San Antonio market. They only have about 1/2 the planned cell sites up as of the Nov 1st launch, but are bringing 4-6 new sites a day up on the air. I've seen areas w/o coverage Nov 1st that now have great coverage today, 1 week later.

I've been a long time Sprint PCS customer, had same # with Sprint since the summer of 1997. I've got 4 Sprint phones, plus a 3G data card (w/o the 5g data cap), and dropped my AT&T home line long time ago. Using Time Warner Road Runner Turbo at home, getting anywhere from 15mbps down to 27mpbs down, depending on RR's mood I suppose. Tried using Vonage, but the call quality varied too much, and my fax machine didn't like it. CLEAR seems to have solved that quality problem, at least my testing shows that using my own set of equip that I activated a week ago today.

I'm posting my own live, around town, speedtest.net results on my web site, which strangely enough is www.wimaxsatx.com, so feel free to browse and compare my results and/or other comments without pressure.

My primary business is general computer consulting, on-site. I've been doing that for 14+ years in the SA area, with a few clients in Austin. My wife does Mac computers, and I do Windows, so we're a "mixed marriage" I suppose. But the point is, we both do on-site service, and I plan to do on-site sales / demos for potential customers, not depending upon what the computer says from their website coverage. If coverage stinks for a prospect, I won't agree to sell it to them unless they are mobile users only and know their coverage area. I've got the cell site map for Austin / San Antonio, but it's changing daily and only eyeball live testing will tell you what is real.

We are talking wireless, that means "radio", that means buildings can block or reflect signals, just like hills or other terrain can block signal or cause the signal to jump over your location. I'm also a Ham Radio operator, so I understand radio wave propagation.

Got my AR demo kit activated a week ago (residential modem, USB modem, Voice ATA box) and have been testing live all over. Bought contract for my wife to activate 2 USB modems, for her Mac computer and our son's Mac computer, and they are working great, when in coverage area of course.

My own house is in a designated "no service yet area", but I still get 3 bars on my residential modem, the voice ATA box is crystal clear, and I'm in the middle of a thunderstorm right now and not experiencing any problems. I get anywhere from 5mbps down to as high as 9mbps down, but only .5mbps to .84mbps up so far.

But if I drive 1/2 mile down the hill to my Homeowner Association's offices, I tested 18.76mbps down, sitting in their parking lot using the USB modem on my laptop. I've posted my own actual results on my www.wimaxsatx.com web site, and encourage other San Antonio CLEAR customers to post their own results there.

[NovaCrystallis]

Looks like Clear is improving slowly....

Hopefully this continues to the norm. Even lower latency would be greatly appreciated.

At this point though I've decided to keep the service I'm pretty sure...I'm gonna be getting a sick discount on my plan and if I buy the equipment upfront I won't be locked into a 2 year contract so if it comes to a point where I become really frustrated with the service I can always quit.

Quick question though to all the resellers out there or any Clear reps....IF I buy the modem and later on down the road Clear comes out with a new Wimax modem would they replace the one I currently own with the new one?

[jfs2]

I hear that they have a tower live in oak hill. Is that correct. What is the farthest tower north in San Antonio that is live?? 281 area