Clear Wireless Clearwire Clear is a cut-rate wireless provider with serious reliability problems Washington DC

Clear Wireless service, while relatively cheap, suffers from periodic outages that last from 24 hours to up to one week.  They deliver their service via WiMax, a souped-up version of WiFi for large areas.  You purchase one of their proprietary antennas and, for $35 a month in my case, you get reasonable speed wireless internet.  So far so good, since when it works, Clear service is generally OK.  It never reaches advertized speeds, has routine slow-downs and brief outages, but not too much to complain about.

What really drives a knife into the customer's back, however, are the outages.  When they come, there is zero notice, zero internet, and entirely misleading responses from Clear customer support.  The outages happen once every couple or few months, and can last for days.  As I write this, my service has just come back after three days.  No amount of calls to Clear will help because much of their operation is outsourced on the cheap.

Customer service is outsourced to India, and local hardware support is outsourced to, if my experience is a guide,  anyone with a toolbox and a truck.  What one soon realizes as a customer of Clear is that they spend just enough on support to squeek by and not one penny more.  While that may appeal to an accountant, it only makes things worse when it really counts.

Clear is unusual among service providers in that they appear to have made the calculation that it is cheaper to rebate those few persistent complaining customers or even lose one or two rather than pay a service technician overtime to actually fix something during a service interruption.  Hence, service gaps that would doom any other company are taken by Clear as a viable cost management strategy.

The bottom line is that if you cannot afford periodic unannounced, prolonged, and total service outages with your internet service, avoid Clear like the customer service plague that it is.