by Nick Mokey
We’ve huddled under awnings on the sidewalk in the rain to tap weak Wi-Fi signals, slipped into hotels as “guests,” and paid big bucks from cell carriers for a wireless modem, all to get our mobile Internet fix. And every option seems to suck in its own way. Whether you’re being hounded by an impatient barista and force fed soft jazz, or waiting 20 seconds for every page to load from a 3G modem, neither comes close to matching the silky-smooth connection and freedom you have at home. Why can’t you just get broadband speeds everywhere?
If you believe the marketing of Clear Wireless, you can. So when the WiMax pioneer rolled into Digital Trends’ home town of Portland, Oregon, plastering up ads on benches, knocking on doors and preaching the greatness of WiMax in radio commercials, we had to put it to the test.
Bar graphs, coverage maps and hypothetical maximum download speeds are great, but we decided to run Clear through the ringer the same way most consumers will: By using it around town. After picking up a new USB WiMax modem from Clear, we tossed a trusty ThinkPad in a backpack and hit the streets… with an AT&T 3G card along for a little competition. Here’s what we found out.
Before we ventured out on a sunny summer afternoon to hit the streets, grab some grub, and get our wireless surf on, we had to get the Clear modem up and running back at Digital Trends HQ. Fortunately, it’s a simple affair. Pop the CD in, install the drivers, click in the modem and hit “Connect” from the software menu. But you read ¬¬correctly, there’s a CD involved. Unlike our AT&T USBConnect Mercury, which acts as a thumb drive storing its own drivers, the Clear modem needed a physical disc. No big deal the first time around – before it’s lost in a drawer somewhere – but for future installs on new PCs and letting friends borrow it, built-in drivers would have been a major plus to make the modem a truly self-sufficient device.
Size-wise, the Motorola WiMax modem looks about like what you would expect from pictures. It’s basically an oversized thumb drive about as long as your ring finger. Clear includes a Belkin flex USB adapter with it, which makes it easier to fit in cluttered USB ports and adjust for signal. As an added plus, it also alleviates fears of snapping the modem off in your USB drive with one misplaced blow, a cringe-worthy event we always pictured with such a long stick hanging out.
We’ve pledged to keep the stats to a minimum here, but before seeing what the modem can do, it’s worth investigating what the tech can do on paper. Like all “maximum speed” claims, these are all purely hypothetical, and you could rarely or never expect to actually reach them in real life. But they should reflect on more typical scenarios, in proportion.
A typical broadband cable connection, like one from Comcast here in Portland, might claim to offer download speeds of 15 Mbps and uploads up to 3 Mbps. Clear’s WiMax network is capable of 6 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. The AT&T card, by contrast, can pull 1.7 Mbps down and 1.2 Mbps up.
To put that in perspective, those figures are all in megabits per second, which need to be divided by eights to get the more typical megabytes per second you might be more familiar with. You can also shove the decimal point over three spaces if you want kilobytes per second, which you’re probably used to seeing when you download things.
Glass and Altitude
Naturally, we began our adventure on Digital Trends’ perch on the 10th floor of the U.S. Bancorp Tower in downtown Portland. Depending how close we got to the window, we pulled a respectable seven to nine out of 10 bars. With this signal, we hit 2.0 Mbps down and 0.6 Mbps up from the Seattle server in SpeakEasy’s Speed Test, which we used as a constant benchmark in this test. That kind of speed was more than enough for everything from casual surfing to streaming 720p video from YouTube. First impression: This thing is fast. Even South Park episodes, which typically tax our connection to the max, streaming fluidly with zero interruption. Though not quite as robust as the 10 Mbps down and 8 Mbps up we got from our landline office connection, the difference between the two was hardly noticeable in most real-life use applications. Unless you’re yanking down movies on BitTorrent, you won’t notice the difference.
But of course, we had to try. And the results blew us away. Though Clear was slow to gather steam on a torrent file, we checked back in about 20 minutes and found it pulling up to 350 kbps on an extremely popular (but legal) file. Downloading high-quality movies from thin air? Believe it. The best we were able to manage with the AT&T modem was about 26 Kbps, and even with full signal, certain stream media formats like South Park’s were unwatchable.
Move away from the window, though, and things change. We started an episode of The Simpsons on a netbook through Hulu, then strolled into the hallway and around the perimeter of the floor with the video still streaming. Adding two walls between us and the outside put a major damper on signal, which dropped as low as zero bars in some spots, also causing the video to sputter when we stayed too long.
At this point, we also noticed that adjusting the antenna could make an enormous difference in signal. In some situations, turning it from vertical to horizontal literally cut the signal in half, from eight bars to four. While it was nice to think we could improve signal with some fiddling when it really got bad, having to think about antenna position also throws a potential kink into ease of use, if you have to do it much.
Going Underground
Things got interesting when we took the elevator down to the bowels of the building for any wireless ISP’s nightmare test: an underground parking garage. With 42 floors of concrete above and thick slabs on all sides, we were entering a tomb where signals feared to tread. And it showed when we fire up the Clear modem.
Nada. The client searched in vain for minutes and turned up not a thread of signal from above.
But we couldn’t help but notice suit-clad BlackBerry addicts chatting it up on the way to their Benzes. As it turns out, cell phones do work here, and so do 3G modems. We clicked in the AT&T stick for what we expected to be shameful failure, only to turn up one bar that eventually grew to three. It delivered a 0.5 Mbps from SpeakEasy. This isn’t the kind of signal you use you watch movies or stream music, but then again, we’re not the kind of creeps that sit around in parking garages watching YouTube. Gmail opened in a very reasonable amount of time, and the connection provided us just enough bandwidth to do some patient surfing, too.
Where Clear fails, older tech sometimes triumphs.
Free and Clear
Following the dismal results down below, we headed back up to the surface for some fresh air and pizza beside the so-called Car Wash fountain outside. After degreasing our pepperoni fingers and giving the spray from the fountain a wider berth, we fired up Clear for some post-lunch TV watching.
The signal was, in the words of Clear’s own software, “perfect.” Ten bars. And it screamed. A test on SpeakEasy showed impressive 3.0 Mbps download speeds, and a much more modest 0.5Mbps upload. At this point, it pretty much felt exactly like a hard line, pulling down South Park episodes, Hulu videos, HD content from YouTube and streaming music from Last.fm without breaking a sweat. We would have been content at the fountain side, finishing an episode of The Simpsons in the shade, but in the name of science, we endeavored on.
On the Move
…And boarded the MAX. Portland’s light rail system snakes its way through the city and east across the Willamette River, running above ground on the same surface streets as cars. The car and tracks present no challenge for wireless signals, but movement does, so we cracked open the ThinkPad on a train headed north to Portland’s Northeast side, by way of the Steel Bridge. By all indications, Clear has this area saturated in green on its coverage map, but our experience didn’t quite reflect that.
On the way out of downtown, signal seemed to drop from excellent strength outside, to at times as low as one bar when the train began to move. A South Park episode continued to stream without issues for a while, but after a few minutes of flaky signal, the buffer ran out and it began to choke and sputter at times. Not unwatchable, but not perfect, either. The movement itself seemed to be interfering with the signal, since it jumped back up to acceptable levels whenever the train stopped. However, when we got off at a stop only about 10 minutes from where we hopped on, things took a turn for the worse.
On the Fringe
The Mississippi/Albina MAX station can’t be called remote by any means – we can practically see it from the office window, and it’s definitely well within Clear’s coverage map. But here, our otherwise stellar Clear signal faded to just one to three bars. A quick SpeakEasy speed test turned up only 0.3 Mbps download speeds and 0.5 Mbps upload speeds, and performance across the Web seemed to reaffirm this. YouTube at standard definition and Last.fm both streamed without stuttering, but higher quality video like 720p content from YouTube and South Park Studios would no longer cut it on our connection. Surfing was also doable, but it lost much of the snappiness we had gotten used to, returning us to speeds that seemed more like a conventional 3G modem. Still it’s worth noting that even with a minimal signal, Clear returned results close to a 3G modem with good signal.
Wrapping Up
After wallowing in the crummy coverage out in North Portland for long enough, we hopped a train back to the nexus of Clear connectivity and grabbed a beer at Captain Ankeny’s in downtown Portland. About ten feet away from the window, the modem managed to snag seven bars – enough to comfortably finish the episode of South Park we started on the MAX, without any buffering issues. SpeakEasy delivered about the results we expected from the signal: 1.2 Mbps down and 0.5 Mbps up. One libation later, we hiked back to work to parse some results.
Results and Conclusion
When it comes to maximum download speeds, Clear blows conventional 3G Internet service out of the water. The 3.0 Mbps benchmark speeds and 350 Kbps we managed to pull with torrent files in areas of excellent signal trump anything you can do with a piddly 3G card.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story, either. WiMax signals also fade much more quickly with walls, concrete and other obstructions. The extra speed helps compensate for this, as we noticed when even poor signal delivered 3G-like speed, but in the worst of circumstances, old-school 3G modems will carry a signal when WiMax will not.
Want to connect anywhere and crawl? A 3G modem is still your best bet.
Want to connect most places and fly? Clear makes a lot of sense.
Given that Clear offers both mobile and home Internet service, the real value in the service might be getting both and converging two bills into one. A well-placed Clear router in the home will provide speeds most casual Web surfers would be thrilled with, and the USB modem will do the same (less reliably) on the go – without paying two bills. At the moment, you can get home and mobile service for one $45 a month bill. By contrast, AT&T charges $60 a month for a limited 5GB DataConnect plan – and you’re still going to have to get home Internet somewhere else. We’re obviously neglecting the very limited size of the Clear network right now, but for folks who want to connect around their own towns, and not in the middle of Iowa, Clear makes a very economical solution, and we can only expect service and coverage to get better as the company grows.
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