ClearWire in ****e tonight?!

RangeR

Blaster99 wrote:

Isn't the purpose of caps to limit usage across the board? If they can't handle usage within their relatively low caps, what kind of ISP are they? If people go mad with P2P then they will hit the cap surely?

I would actually tend to agree with you on that one Blaster. They have their caps for a reason so why the need to throttle.

I have my own thoughts on that one. Normal non power users [heavy downloaders], would not be using the connection all the time hence the cap suits them, or should I say designed for them. In that for 20 days out of the month they would barely use their connection for any more than surfing or email. But the odd time, want to download the latest 3GB game or something.

However, as we know, a lot of us on the Broadband forum like to download and sometimes upload. Whether it be for work, ISO's, P2P, music or whatever. If you think about it. If all the power users where downloading constantly at the same time, continuously, it would have an affect an ANY newtwork.

Even think about an interal 100Mbps [or is it MBps?] network. If there are a few users transferring GB's of files all day to each other, the network comes to a crawl. I've seen this a few times and it ain't pretty.

Now multiply that by x users on a bigger pipe on a public network. It still equates to the same thing. A few users flooding the network to the detriment of the rest. It doesn't matter how big ISP's, Clearwire in this case, make their backhaul pipe, the power users would still find a way of maxing it out.

It's a lose-lose scenario for the ISP and the power user. So, the ISP chooses the non power users and limits traffic, to the detriment of the few.


My second thought on this is, as we all know [and I'm not going to get into it again on this thread] that most P2P traffic is illegal. The ISP's can be held legally responsable for allowing it to happen on their network. Maybe they are just covering themselves, and indirectly the P2P users, buy limiting that traffic to unbareable speeds.


Again, these are only my thoughts, rightly or wrongly. I hope I explained myself properly.

Blaster99

Most ISP's can handle it, so why not Clearwire?

I'm half-suspecting it has something to do with their technology. Wireless technology is fairly sensitive to somebody hogging the bandwidth in a sector.

RangeR

Yeah, I've heard that from a few places in relation to WISP's

Although, I was onto ClearWire yesterday and they said that the high site was almost clear. only about 10 people connected and very low bandwitdh usage.

Unless my problems yesterday were not to do with my base station but somewhere else down the line.

My VPN is gone again. 85Kb upload. Not good.
Not going to cancel contract as it's still better than DSL in my area but I need my connection back working.

Ludo

Well onto Clearwire again now to complain about the sh*t service they are providing for gamers as they have latency issues. They said that they are currently remodelling their servers to oprimize performance for gaming and VOIP. He confirmed that P2P is being blocked as we know.

This is crap. It's been a week now like this. How bloody long does it take implement this change? I work in a telecoms network management company myself and I know that if we did something like this there would be hell to pay. Have they ever heard of scheduling tasks like this for off-peak hours or notifying customers of interruptions to areas of service.

They said it should be finished by Monday but they cant guarantee this.

Pity is that Clearwire are the only provider I can get as my eircom line doesnt support DSL and IBB doesnt have LOS. If I could get another provider, I would have told them where to shove their service immediately.

Tiesto

how is skype working for everyone today?

Cake Fiend

Eth0, have you tried moving your modem to another window (if you have that option)? Tonight I turned mine (in Rathmines) from pointing toward Portobello (sh1te) to pointing toward Ranelagh (much better). It might be a problem with particular masts. I still get occasional disconnects, but before I moved it, they were a several-times-daily occurrence and latency is now much lower.

stakey

Rang em again... wanted to clarify a few things...

Spoke to a friendly senior rep in support.

"We're not blocking P2P traffic, we're not restricting it" eh, erm? That's not what was said to me yesterday. Apparently according to him, one or two people are causing the disruption.

This traffic is apparently causing the issues with other services: VOIP, pings to servers in Ireland and the UK. I asked if they were going to block P2P traffic or restrict it in the future, the answer was a mixture of no and erm, maybe.

Now fair enough for taking my call... but I'm not impressed that they couldn't even cater for this much extra demand on their network. To me it looks as though they over bloated the network too quickly and the masts can't handly the volume of traffic.

He pointed out that their network was being modified to cater for voip/gaming and surfing. I pointed out that the T&C's stated that any change to their network would mean that customers would have to be contacted. He claimed no change was being made.

Nice people, friendly service, but TBH this sort of round in circles dialog is a little annoying to say the least. All will be well on Monday, or so I have been told.

I continue looking into other services...

layke

Caps are there to make money. They always have been. Bandwith is DIRT cheap at that level. My mate owns a Web hosting company and they are getting a GB line in. Apperently it's getting cheaper by the day.

I would see any other reason apart from money as a blatent lie from an ISP.

Granted I have seen problems with some BB networks like IBB overselling to capacity causing lag issues, not because they don't have a cap but rather they give the best package for the cheapest price.

On the P2P traffic bit. Just use a differnt range of ports and they will be none the wiser. I'm not aware of ISPs blocking or slowing the connection on those ports in Ireland but appperently it's common practice in the US.

dub45

deconstruct wrote:

Rang em again... wanted to clarify a few things...

Spoke to a friendly senior rep in support.
.............................................

He pointed out that their network was being modified to cater for voip/gaming and surfing. I pointed out that the T&C's stated that any change to their network would mean that customers would have to be contacted. He claimed no change was being made.

.............

I continue looking into other services...

Modified to cater for surfing? What a surprise - customers are actually surfing the net???

And those young folk are playing games on line what a surprise!!!!!

That's incredible!!!!!!! What was their network originally set up to cater for? Email only:rolleyes:

eth0_

Well perhaps they've stopped me from using p2p! And i've probably downloaded about 3GB of data from bit torrent in the near two months i've had clearwire.

Is that ABUSE? Jesus F Christ....

eth0_

Sico wrote:

Eth0, have you tried moving your modem to another window (if you have that option)? Tonight I turned mine (in Rathmines) from pointing toward Portobello (sh1te) to pointing toward Ranelagh (much better). It might be a problem with particular masts. I still get occasional disconnects, but before I moved it, they were a several-times-daily occurrence and latency is now much lower.

I can't do that, due to the layout of my house the only way I could move the modem to the other side of the house is to stick the modem to the glass above the hall door!

stakey

eth0, i'd say they are stopping/restricting p2p traffic, I just think they're not admitting to it any more, bad PR.

eth0_

Urgh, it's pretty f*cking obvious though.

They're allowing me to cancel btw. Got a mail yesterday saying someone would contact me in the coming days to arrange that.

Oh, and could I still send them as many ping and traceroutes as possible as other people are having the same issues as me....lol

Blaster99

I haven't used the service for a few days but now Skype no longer works. A bit of consistency would be handy.

Mac daddy

i haven't been able to get a signal since thursday night !!!

Rang them on thursday, problems with high latency they changed a couple of settings on the mast asked me to power cycle the modem and since then it just keeps on scanning and scanning not picking up anything.

Tried it in different locations in the house same problem,

Last week sunday when i was on call got a call at 5am booted it, modem didn't pick up a Ip adress.

I'm going to call them on monday again, if its not sorted by then, very simple they can keep it.

I need a reliable service not one that doesn't pick up a Ip and i need to drive into work in the middle of the night!

For now i'm using ripwave because the other one is screwed.

Not happy one bit with clearwire.

eth0_

same here mac daddy, having to drive into work in the middle of the night when you could fix the problem from bed if your fscking internet connection WORKED isn't great.

eth0_

So this is broadband...

PING www.clearwire.ie (85.134.255.242): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 85.134.255.242: icmp_seq=0 ttl=61 time=1478.662 ms
64 bytes from 85.134.255.242: icmp_seq=1 ttl=61 time=1432.314 ms
64 bytes from 85.134.255.242: icmp_seq=2 ttl=61 time=1578.498 ms
64 bytes from 85.134.255.242: icmp_seq=3 ttl=61 time=1529.796 ms
64 bytes from 85.134.255.242: icmp_seq=4 ttl=61 time=1431.148 ms
64 bytes from 85.134.255.242: icmp_seq=5 ttl=61 time=1334.604 ms
64 bytes from 85.134.255.242: icmp_seq=6 ttl=61 time=1425.846 ms
64 bytes from 85.134.255.242: icmp_seq=7 ttl=61 time=1161.092 ms
64 bytes from 85.134.255.242: icmp_seq=8 ttl=61 time=1280.629 ms
64 bytes from 85.134.255.242: icmp_seq=9 ttl=61 time=1209.827 ms
64 bytes from 85.134.255.242: icmp_seq=10 ttl=61 time=1123.972 ms
^C
--- www.clearwire.ie ping statistics ---
12 packets transmitted, 11 packets received, 8% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 1123.972/1362.399/1578.498/144.596 ms

dub45

I am amazed that people flock so quickly to new isps without waiting to see what the actual service is like

Surely the moral of the story is to wait a few months until they have proven themselves and then sign up?

eth0_

Well if everyone thought the way you did, all new ISP's would have no customers and would go out of business!

I went with clearwire because my housemate was unwilling to change our phone number - we were initially going to go with Smart Telecom, and probably will move to them now because clearwire is just unusable now.

dub45

eth0_ wrote:

Well if everyone thought the way you did, all new ISP's would have no customers and would go out of business!

I went with clearwire because my housemate was unwilling to change our phone number - we were initially going to go with Smart Telecom, and probably will move to them now because clearwire is just unusable now.

Well there will always be the inevitable early starters who will go in and suffer!
It happens time after time on here - people were recommending Smart before anyone was connected!!!!

Clearwire must have relatively few customers and apparently they cant even cope with those!

Blaster99

There are obviously P2P issues generally and VoIP issues for me that I haven't had the time to deal with the last week, but for me Clearwire's service is to spec other than that.

There were people on trial for months and none of this stuff came up, so there was a lot of initial positive feedback. P2P aside, it's possible most users are happy and some suffer from wireless anomalies.

eth0_

wireless anomalies?
My service has been fine, up until around two weeks ago. I have massive packet loss and my pings are enormous. I can't use VOIP and I can't use p2p. They deem streaming radio an 'abuse' of their 'service'. What an absolute joke.

Do Clearwire honestly expect people to pay them 40 euro a month to surf the web?

Get real!

I've changed none of my settings, i've cooperated with support in trying to resolve the issue despite never being able to speak to an actual engineer, only customer service people who apologise profusely and promise to resolve my problems. They never do. I offered to create an account on my machine for their engineers to log into and run tests. They didn't even respond to that.

I wouldn't recommend them to anyone now.

Yggr of Asgard

Until now I was a fan of ClearWire and their customer support and posted accordingly, but now I’m getting the feeling that they don’t have a clue what they are doing.

Skype connection did work sporadically and my VOIP worked 75% of time.

This morning anything else than http traffic does not work anymore. No direct exchange server connection, no VPN (Cisco or IPSec or PPTP). No terminal server connections into systems I know that are up. Nothing. Unless I use http: nothing works.

So I plugged the modem directly into 4 different PC’s to test and on all systems exactly the same problem. Browsing fine, no Skype, no VOIP, no Remote desktop connections nothing.

So I call customer support and am put through to a manager who asks me the basic steps and just don’t get the point. http works fine but still I need to ping god and the world.

So tries to ping the addresses I try to use and on his basic clearwire connection he has no problems whatsoever and get’s pings to the same IP’s I try and get’s replies where I don’t.

So he starts blaming my 4 PC’s and automatic updates to my antivirus program (well it’s different one’s on the 4 PC’s).

So I tell him if I take my laptop to my neighbor and use his eircom dsl it works fine but not when on ClearWire.

I told him this mess started when they started throttling P2P and experimenting with their network and he was very adamant about the fact that they don’t do such thing. There is no throttling Sir, we are currently modifying our servers to ensure that all customers get enough bandwidth

So I now use my neighbors DSL WiFi (with his permission) and hope that the technical manager of Clearwire (who only will be back in the office tomorrow at 1000) will give me a ring than.

It worked all fine (Skype, VoiP etc.) until they decided to do modifications on their end (which they don’t publish, tell people about or even remotely communicate) and now they blame my PC’s?

eth0_

Argh why are they such barefaced liars? THEY ARE THROTTLING p2p!

It's plainly fscking obvious.

Tiesto

not only that..im pretty sure they are banning ports. did any of ye EVER get connected to Soulseek ?

Ludo

For what it is worth, they appear to have sorted their ping issues when gaming...all working fine today after a week of crap

Ludo

Ludo wrote:

For what it is worth, they appear to have sorted their ping issues when gaming...all working fine today after a week of crap

I take it back...It iis still in crap. Obviously a temporary moment of usability for the clearwire network. Normal service is now restored...i.e. crap

eth0_

--- www.clearwire.ie ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 8 packets received, 20% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 1359.940/1417.166/1462.347/34.073 ms


Yes, this is 'broadband', apparently.

stakey

not only are pings bad on games, some applications such as Steam wouldn't even launch for me today... I got connected earlier but had to do with a ping of 980, wahey! Thank you clearwire... asshats!

Mac daddy

Day Nr 4 Still no connection,

Sick and tired off calling them for basic troubleshooting crap !!

If it worked before why does it not pickup a signal now idiots.......... just keeps on scanning and scanning no matter where i put it :mad:

Since last week i have had to use Ripwave to connect to the net and vpn into work that way because the modem does not pick up a signal,
Tonight when i get home calling them straight away again if its not solved by the time i get off them phone they can come and collect it don't want something that does not work as should,

P2p blocking wtf is this about i pay good money for my connection and should be able to do wtf i want.
Was planning on using skype at some stage seeing all the problem with the connection might aswell forget that one.

Really pissed off and annoyed with this ****e, fear its going to another Ibb.