Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Clearwire, not so clear after all

About 3 years ago Richard and I got Clearwire internet, at the time it worked really well and we had no complaints and would happily recommend them to anyone looking for a good internet provider. Mind you that was three years ago and we were living in a different apartment with 7 foot tall windows and on the second floor. We had great service, now mind you the apartment was crap but the internet rocked, mostly just cause of the location of the building, turns out it is like smack dab in the middle of 3 towers of clearwires so its well covered. Didn't find that out till yesterday. Anyways I am jumping ahead of myself. As most know, we moved from that prime internet location because we couldn't stand living there anymore. We moved up the road about maybe a mile or possible two. And the internet worked great, or so we thought.

Shortly after moving to where we are now we had problem and lost the net, we called up clearwire and they said our tower that we have in the apartment wasn't working and they would send us a new one. Ok no problems there, new one came, we sent the broke one back all was good. till about April of this year. We started having issues with the internet not working, it would work and call up pages then all of the sudden we were getting booted off of the net and then it would work fine again. I called up and asked what was up and they said that they were having problems and it should be fixed shortly. Well they fixed their problems but we were still having problems of our own with it. We were lucky if it worked and prayed that it would last long enough to let us do what we needed to do online. We also figured out that it worked better on partly cloudy days, only partly cloudy. It wouldn't work on Sunny days or days where all you see is clouds and it rains (which has been mostly this summer). Mind you this Started in April, it is now the Middle of July and we are still having issues.

Last week Richard got sick of it not working and called clearwire to see what was going on cause it wasn't just us having problems, cause before all the problems started mom asked me what internet provider I used and if I would recommend them and I said yes, she gets clearwire and BAM it goes to shit. He is on the phone with them for like an hour, he does everything they say take the tower to a different window, how about a different room? Still only one bar of service huh? not holding, rotating through all five lights you say? weird ok we will have a tech support guy come to your apartment on Monday July 19th between the hours of 10am-1pm. After that phone call we got really great service, it worked as long as we were on it no problems at all, us thinking that wow maybe we don't have to worry about this tech support guy coming out cause I mean what is he going to do walk in and go oh there is a loose wire on the tower let me fix that.

So Yesterday I gave up my laundry day cause tech support was coming out, which worked out fine anyways cause I was able to get the apartment clean. A little bit before 11am I get a phone call saying that the guy would be here in less than 15 minutes, Bonus Points to the tech guy for not making me wait forever. He shows up comes in and we start talking about the problems that Richard and I were having with the net. The guy works on his laptop for a couple of minutes, moves the tower around asks when we noticed having problems I guestamated about April, he goes back to the laptop looks at it some more then goes yup it was April and huh. I'm sorry but you never want to hear HUH come out of a tech support guy. Because that means that you have just stumped him.

He calls me over to his laptop and shows me the coverage area and says see you guys are covered but you are the the edge of 3 towers which shouldn't make a difference cause you shouldn't be having any problems at all. He then explained it to me as dropped calls and showed me how many "dropped calls" we have been getting with our service. Lets just say that last year we had only a few like maybe 5-10 a month which is normal, they went from that to 80-100 and just this month alone to over 1500 "dropped calls" which is bad. THen told us to cancel our internet through them cause he can't fix the problem we are having and that there is no point in paying them money. For a tech support to say that means a lot.

When Richard got home from work I told him what the guy said, and we went to go see how much dsl through ACS was going to cost us. There is no start up fee since we had at one point a phone through them so it's basically $89.00 a month for internet and phone. SO we will once again have a home phone again. Plus it will have caller id, call waiting and 100 interstate long distant minutes. All of that is included in the 89 bucks a month. So we signed up yesterday and now just have to wait for our modem to show up in the mail and for our phone line to be turned back on and to get a piece of paper in the mail with our new phone number on it.

So I do not recommend clearwire to anyone! they are a horrible company that doesn't know their head from the hole in the ground. All I got to say is thank god we never got a home phone threw them like they were pushing us to do cause it wouldn't of been working since April. WE still are putting up with clearwire till our modem shows up then we are canceling and never looking back and we are going to tell people not to go with them if they live in this area at all cause they would just be throwing their money down the toilet. Oh the tech guy even told me to tell mom how to get out of her 2 year contract with them, which is basically having her call and ask for tech support to come out and since it's just this guy he will come out and go yeah I can't help and the kill the contract for her so she can call and cancel with out being charged for ending the contract early.

2 comments:

Jane said...

I HAAAAATE when the internet is messed up. HUGS! Hopefully the new company will be much better!

That tech guy was very cool to help you out and give you the tip for your mom. :)

Tara Ann said...

agreed ^ glad they could help u!