Clear Wireless Review: Stay Far Way

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I rarely have such a bad experience with a company that I'm compelled to blog about it so the internet searchers out there won't have the same experience as I did.

Clear Wireless Broadband Internet gave me one of the most horrible customer experiences I have ever had. I was misled, lied to, put on hold, and treated poorly at every point of contact in a 30 day "risk free" trial period that seemed like an eternity.

One thing is for sure: hell will have the internet and hell's ISP will be Clear Wireless.

Recently, we decided we want to simplify our communication options from having DirecTV, land line phone, and DSL internet to having a Roku and broadband internet. This would save us money every month. Since DSL is expensive if you don't have a landline, we looked for an alternative to DSL and settled on Clear Wireless.

Clear advertises that you can take your internet anywhere and experience broadband speeds wherever you are. Their commercials show people doing voice chatting in a taxi cab or a mom checking her email while waiting for the kids at soccer practice. Sounds great.

I gave them a call and told them exactly what I was doing. I wanted to have Netflix and/or Hulu and stream our TV. The salesperson told me I needed their $45 a month high usage plan. I said great.

They then wanted to check my credit report. I told them I don't have any debt, so my credit report is frozen. They said unfreeze it. I said that would cost me $10. We argued back and forth. They wouldn't let me get into a two year agreement with them unless they checked my credit report. This was the first hint that this would be a company I don't want to do business with, but at the time I thought it was an irritating inconvenience of being "off the grid" with debt.

A few days later we received our modem. Plugged it in. Great. Went to speedtest.net and tested the speed: 0.5 Mbps. Not good. I moved the modem around and played with it (it is connecting to a tower at the east end of my neighborhood). Finally got 7 Mbps. Not great, but as good as what we were getting with DSL. A couple of days later we got our Apple TV (later switching to Roku) and started going. Great.

Then the mysterious slowdowns started. We would be watching a show on our Apple TV and it would pause, get more data....every 30 seconds. It made it unwatchable. This happened mostly at night, so about three days into the slowdowns I decided to do some testing. I went to speedtest.net again and got 0.5 Mbps. Not good again.

Realizing that I was within my 30 day "risk-free" trial period (more on that later), I knew I needed to get to the bottom of it. Realizing that I had a cell phone with limited minutes, I decided to do chat support.

10 minutes of waiting later, the guy gets on and tells me to clear my browser cache (no honey I wasn't looking at porn) then power off my modem, wait 10 seconds, plug in my ethernet directly to my computer, and initiate a new chat session.

10 minutes of waiting later, I spend another 10 minutes convincing the new guy that I had already done all of the canned steps and still have 0.5 Mbps speed. The guy the told me that the problem was too complicated to troubleshoot over chat and to call them. All of this happening with me sitting 2 ft away from my TV with my 3 ft ethernet cable, fighting off the kids, trying to not give them any material for their shrink in 20 years.

10 minutes of waiting on the call later, I spend another 10 minutes convincing the new guy that I had already done all of the canned steps and still have 0.5 Mbps speed. He then uses his diagnostic tools and tells me that there is a lot of traffic on the tower. I ask him if that's ever going to change. He then tells me the truth:

My internet speed was being lowered by Clear because I was using too much.

OK, good to know. The "customer support" person I was transferred to explained to me that I was free to watch streaming video, but only on occasion. I couldn't be using too much internet. OK, I wish the nice salesperson would have told me that. They had exposed themselves as the false advertising scam that they are.

I made other arrangements and got cable internet through Time Warner Cable which is between 10 Mpbs and 20 Mbps. Then I called to cancel my service the other day.

After an eternity of being on hold, they informed me that I wasn't getting a refund for my usage. When I had called them earlier in the month, they told me I would? Why am I not getting a refund? Because I had used too much internet. At 0.5 Mbps. After being lied to.

So Clear, thanks for nothing and I hope my post keeps people from using your service.