ClearWire in ****e tonight?!

eth0_

Blaster99 wrote:

Who said anything about using Skype?

By the way, would that be facts like

Clearwire: "Yes we block VoIP."

Blueface: "Yes, Clearwire blocks VoIP by default."

You've qualified for my ignore list. Well done.

If you bothered to read this thread you'd see theres another boards user who uses VoIP too. Skype is VoIP last time I checked.

Oh no, i'm on your ignore list, how horrid!

eth0_

ZENER wrote:

I use Skype too also without problems. The only services they seem to be limiting are P2P and bit-torrents where they seem to restrict available bandwidth for those services. Someone else here called it port shaping I think.

ZEN

I only have problems with some torrents...most of the time I get at least 15Kb/s, normally 30 or more.

Blaster99

Skype works perfectly. Very good quality.

I just used Blueface with Eircom ADSL, works like a dream. Connected it to Clearwire, dead as disco.

Hoodle

eth0_ wrote:

I have been using Skype and SkypeOut with no problems since I got my connection set up and it works just fine. Last time I used it was Saturday.

Arse...I thought it was Clearwire that was making Skype dodgy for me. I used SkypeOut the day I received my modem and it was perfect. Ever since, its been a pile of ass with me hearing the other end perfectly but them not hearing me at all.

Off topic - but any ideas?

sisyphus

I use Skype too also without problems. The only services they seem to be limiting are P2P and bit-torrents where they seem to restrict available bandwidth for those services. Someone else here called it port shaping I think.

I always get biabolical speeds using BitTorrent, or other p2p appz, but haven't had any major problems with VoIP. As for them blocking VoIP, I can't see why any rep or other would say this......

Tiesto

yea the p2p thing is annoying.
When i was talking to them on the phone last i asked them if there is some sort of bandwidth throttling system in place for p2p..
they said there is not
but thats gotta be bull****..
i wonder is there any point in me ringing them up and asking for them to tweak my connection for p2p ??

Shougeki

Some of the modems shipped DO have VOIP turned off. They can enable this over the phone with a quick reset while on the phone with them.......

Confiormed by a rep who turned mine on even though i don t use it.

B

sudurban_blues

Tiesto wrote:

yea the p2p thing is annoying.
When i was talking to them on the phone last i asked them if there is some sort of bandwidth throttling system in place for p2p.

I asked them this on the phone as well, and their head of technical support told me that they are throttling p2p traffic, in my case BT and amule. You could try asking them, but I made it clear that it was an issue for me and nothing was forthcoming.

Ludo

Dunno about anyone else, but the disconnect problem was a major headache last night. Pings were also still crap when actually connected. Every few minutes my connection dropped and would come back soon afterwards. I had a steady three bars all the time which is fine normally. Something has definitely gone a bit haywire in the last few days. Getting a bit worried that this may turn into another IBB type scenario.

RangeR

I just rang their support line a few minutes ago. I'm starting to get ping spikes and unresponsiveness. At the weekends when I play my games, I'm getting anything from 300 to 900 ping times in HL2 to Euro servers. I normally get ping times around the 40 mark. I have to use my BT DSL which gives me pings of 60 to 70 normally.

I'm noticing a good loss in quality today and over the past few days. I haven't done any tests, I'm too busy, but if I can notice them without any other software, it must be bad.

They said that their P2P is flooded at the moment. To be honest, I wouldn't care if they trottled or even disallowed P2P protocols on their network. It would make it more stable. Of course there are legitmate uses, but lets be honest here, most of it is illegal. But that discussion has been done to death.

Sorry guys that use P2P, but a lot of P2P inteferes with other connections

Cake Fiend

ZENER wrote:

I'm not sure how the Clearwire box works, whether or not it has any NAT capabilities or is simply an interface to their network.

It seems, by default, to be some sort of basic ethernet-wireless bridge, although it's possible that it's a NAT-capable router that's in bridging mode when they give it to you. Might be worth ringing and seeing if they can switch on NAT for you for a bit of added security. Then again, you should ideally be using a firewall or at least a NAT-capable proxy between your PC/network and the modem in the first place.

eth0_

Pings are spiking all over the place and i've had a few disconnections tonight again.

I can't put up with this much longer...my housemates can't use the internet because it disconnects even more often when the wireless router is hooked up, even though it's been fine until just a few days ago. And I tested my wireless router on a friends cable connection and it worked fine.

I'm giving this til the end of the week before I order DSL off someone...!

xeduCat

What sort of position is your modem in? I still haven't had an outage since the first day, when I had to keep moving the modem, to get a clear view. It's 2 or 3 bars, pings as posted above (sometimes lower, but not significantly), and as long as I don't move it (it's on the inside of a window balanced a bit precariously!)

I also am bridging an iBook (through airport-connection sharing; my desktop machine - mac mini - is the one connected to the Clearwire modem), and again, no problems there either.

eth0_

My modem is fine. 4 solid bars. It's in my bedroom window where it has a good LOS of guinness. Not that it needs LOS.

The fact is, i've changed NOTHING. My modem and router haven't been moved, their configuration hasn't been changed, since I got clearwire. It's just in the last 1-2 weeks that things have gone to sh*t.

I've had no response from clearwire since sunday, not since they rang me to tell me my problem was their highest priority.

Ludo

I talked to ClearWire customer support last night and the guy said they are fully aware of an issue that arose last friday with regard to the ping/latency issue. This issue does not arise when pinging or doing a tracert from the command prompt but only when done on specific ports during gaming. They are working flat out he said to address this issue as they have received a number of complaints and will get back to me when they have a solution.

If they resolve this quickly and get back to me about it then I won't have a problem with it as this would be the correct action. Of course it has been like this for five days now so the window for fixing this in a timely manner is quickly running out (some would say it already has).

I also mentioned the disconnect issue which I experienced on Monday evening and others are seeing regularly. He said he didnt know about that one. As it wasn't happening to me last evening he couldnt do much about it other than noting it on the report for the engineer to look into.

I must say the guy last night seemed to know his stuff unlike the person I talked to on Monday who hadnt a clue. Unfortunately I have no choice of switching to DSL as ClearWire are the only privoded I can get Broadband from currently.

eth0_

Ludo wrote:

I talked to ClearWire customer support last night and the guy said they are fully aware of an issue that arose last friday with regard to the ping/latency issue. This issue does not arise when pinging or doing a tracert from the command prompt but only when done on specific ports during gaming. They are working flat out he said to address this issue as they have received a number of complaints and will get back to me when they have a solution. .

Did clearwire tell you the issue only happens during gaming or is that your experience?
I've been sending them pings and traceroutes (from the command line) since this issue arose, and there are spikes *everywhere*. It's really bad.

Web surfing is quite slow. Not as slow as dialup but still annoyingly slow.

But the disconnects are what really p*ss me off, because i'm having to use ethernet to get on the net as opposed to wireless, which means i'm stuck in my bedroom if I want to use the internet, and my housemates can't get online at all!

I still get a lot of disconnects when connected directly to the modem but it gets much worse when I connect my (perfectly functioning) wireless router.

Actually, when I say 'disconnect', i'm not actually disconnected from the clearwire modem...I still have four solid bars on it. I mean I lose an IP address. DHCP seems to just DIE and expire the lease on my IP address.

If I was a clearwire engineer, the first thing i'd have done is give me a static IP to see if perhaps that made a difference. But I shouldn't have to tell them how to fix my problem now, should I?

RangeR

eth0_ wrote:

I still get a lot of disconnects when connected directly to the modem but it gets much worse when I connect my (perfectly functioning) wireless router.

Actually, when I say 'disconnect', i'm not actually disconnected from the clearwire modem...I still have four solid bars on it. I mean I lose an IP address. DHCP seems to just DIE and expire the lease on my IP address.

If I was a clearwire engineer, the first thing i'd have done is give me a static IP to see if perhaps that made a difference. But I shouldn't have to tell them how to fix my problem now, should I?

Ah, there's where I differ from your setup. My Wireless lan is dropped of my DSL connection. I am wired up to the clearwire at all times on some of my computers.

I also have a "Static" IP Address.

However, It's not just games that I have problems with. This used to be the case a week or so ago. Now, It takes about 3 or 4 minutes to complete a VPN / Remote Desktop connection to my computer in Boston. When I switched to DSL [1Mb:128k:] It all happened within 5 to 10 seconds.

Deffo a problem here, and now it's reeally affecting my work.

eth0_

IrishTLR wrote:

Ah, there's where I differ from your setup. My Wireless lan is dropped of my DSL connection. I am wired up to the clearwire at all times on some of my computers.

I also have a "Static" IP Address.

What do you mean your wireless lan is dropped? If you go to your wireless routers internal IP address, does it show it's connected to the internet, does it have a public IP address?

When I go to my routers homepage it says 'Internet: disconnected'

I also need this connection for VPN. I was on call the past week and connecting to servers (in Dublin) took a few minutes and was very laggy.

I should also add that I asked them at the weekend if they want me to create a login to my computer so they can run tests as it seems a bit futile to have me send them pings and traceroutes via email. I've had no response to that so far.

RangeR

eth0_ wrote:

What do you mean your wireless lan is dropped?

Sorry, my bad. What I mean is that my Wireless access point is connected to my DSL line. My Clearwire isn't.

I'm not moving my Wireless over to clearwire until I'm 100% satisfied in the product.

Having said that, I have been very happy with Clearwire since I purchased it, except the past week or so.

Ludo

Agreed...I was very happy with it until last friday. Hopefully normal service will be resumed soon.

Hoodle

Just spoke to Tech Support about the VoIP difficulties. The Tech didn't seem to know of a VoIP throttle and said VoIP has been down for about 5 days and that it had been sent to the top of the chain.

He will let me know of what happens.

So we'll see.

RangeR

Hoodle wrote:

VoIP has been down for about 5 days and that it had been sent to the top of the chain.

Hmmm, seems unlikely as I use VoIP every day, Monday to Friday, and I've never been out of service. A few packets lost here and there but I could always make and take calls during normal business hours.

Blaster99

They seem to be very confused about VoIP.

eth0_

Hoodle wrote:

it had been sent to the top of the chain.

Yeah, that's what they told me on SUNDAY about my problem, and i've not heard a peep since.
If my issue isn't resolved by the end of the week i'm moving to DSL, which is a shame because clearwire has been great up til now.

Hoodle

eth0_ wrote:

If my issue isn't resolved by the end of the week i'm moving to DSL

I would've done that from the outset had the flat we moved into had a phone line installed. €130 and a 6 week wait didn't sound like fun.

I hope they can get this sorted, sooner rather than later.

Hoodle

IrishTLR wrote:

Hmmm, seems unlikely as I use VoIP every day, Monday to Friday, and I've never been out of service. A few packets lost here and there but I could always make and take calls during normal business hours.

Apolgies for the double post.

Is that using Skype, TLR?

RangeR

Hoodle wrote:

Apolgies for the double post.

Is that using Skype, TLR?

No it's not. I don't think you would have heard of the software hardware combination I'm using.

I have a Uniden UIP 300 hard IP phone [ie, not software] and using our companies custom built telecomms software [SIP and H.323 but I'm using 323 for my VoIP].

And no, you can't have a copy unless you could afford about €20,000 in hardware and about €10,000 in software [OS not incuded ]

Hoodle

IrishTLR wrote:

And no, you can't have a copy unless you could afford about €20,000 in hardware and about €10,000 in software [OS not incuded ]

OUCH!

Back to the topic, to make matters more infuriating is that I always have 5 green bars on the modem!

People back home in England think I've died as I haven't (VoIP) called them in the past week. (joke...a bad one at that).

stakey

Quite strange... I don't use VOIP that often but I tried it out the other day after reading through this thread, it works, but not brilliantly, alot 'noise' on the line with a large delay on the transmission and receiving ends.

Think this might be related to the big prob i'm having, I use Team Speak quite alot for clan stuff. Works fine, everyone is nice and loud and clear, however when I chat I break up, people hear me about 2-3 minutes after speaking and when they do here me it's broken, ie. h-l-- ho- a-- -ou.

Pings to servers are still a little erratic, in CS:S last night it did drop to 35 and only dared go as high as 85, so an improvement over the 980 I was getting a while ago. However the nice ping of 35 meant I kept timing out to the Teamspeak server.

Some dodgy stuff goin' on here... Tempted by NTL I am now.

Hoodle

Rang Tech Support again, just out of interest to see if they told me the same as before.

Surprise, surprise, I get a different story about VoIP:

"As far as we're aware, VoIP is working fine at the moment, and no throttling is in place".

Thought I'd ask about P2P as well:

"The majority of our traffic was P2P based so we've throttled P2P usage to the region of 2kbps".

They better get their act together about VoIP, or the toys are gonna come out the pram.