CLEAR made their WiMAX service available to the public in Austin, Texas on Sunday, November 1st. Coverage at this time is running mainly up the I-35 corridor from around Slaughter Lane to just North of Round Rock. Only a portion of the the 3 to 4 hundred towers that will eventually make up the complete system form San Marcos to Georgetown have been turned on so far. This will be changing almost daily, so if you're not in coverage one day, you may be shortly. This is the "soft launch" of the WiMAX service, which means CLEAR will not be popping the bubbly and showcasing the service until December 1st, when much more of the area should be covered.

I activated my home modem on Sunday, and my mobile USB modem on Monday. I was upgrading my laptop to Windows 7, so I wasn't ready to test out the mobile until then. So, what are the results, and is CLEAR WiMAX worth looking into? The simple answer is...the results are looking good so far, and YES, for the price of the service, CLEAR is definitely set up to be a formidable force in Internet Service Provider choices to be found in Austin.

First, let's look at the home service experience. The home modem (Motorloa CPEi 150) is designed to be plug and play. You unpack it, plug in the power, plug an ethernet cable between the modem and your computer (or router) and start sufring the net. For me, this is exactly how it went. I plugged it in, rotated it a bit to find the strongest signal level, and what do you know, I was online just as advertised. When I pulled the modem out of the box, I set it on a desk that is close to an outside window. As it turns out, the closest tower to my location is 1.8 miles to the Northwest, which just happens to be in a line straight out this window. With these conditions, I get a good steady 4 out 5 bars of signal strength, and in the evenings, it tends to hold pretty steady at 5 bars. For best performance, you will need to locate this modem near an outside wall, and preferrably one that faces the nearest tower. Your CLEAR Authorized Retailer can tell you exactly where the nearest tower is from your location, in both distance and direction.

So how are the speeds? Well, with just a little playing around, I was getting download speeds ranging from 4 Mbs up to 11 Mbs. It seems to run about 6-8 Mbs on average, which is plenty good enough for my purposes. The upload speeds are a bit more fickle, and I have seen from .25 to .6 Mbs on the home modem. I'm hoping this is related to the system being new, and future tweaks will get it closer to the 1 Mbs advertised. Remember, 1 Mbs upload speed is best case, so I may just have to settle for what I've got now. My current SuddenLink internet service is rated at 8 Mbs down and 512 Kbs up, so as long as I can get close to this on the upload, I'll be happy. So here is the best and worst I've seen on the home service so far using speedtest.net and different servers:

Now for the mobile service using the CLEAR USB modem and my laptop. CLEAR gives you a little USB dongle in the USB modem box that comes with the software to download the "Connection Manager" needed to connect to the service. I did not use this, as I just finished installing Windows 7, and heard that the software on this dongle may not be compatible with Windows 7. I just downloaded the software straight from the Clear.com website. The connection manager software is actually quite good, and gives you the ability to directly control whether you want to hook up to the WiMAX network, or any available Wi-FI network in range. Very Slick.

Once I had the connection manager installed, I plugged in the USB modem. The driver needed for the modem self installed on my laptop, and I was taken to my CLEAR account to set things up. Once finished there, I was surfing the net. To start out, I was inside at the kitchen counter. The USB modem also seems to be sensitive to the direction pointed, and after playing around a bit, I was getting some pretty good speed.

To shorten this up, I could get 4-6 Mbs down and around .3 Mbs up while in the house. What was really cool though, was when I walked outside on my back patio, which is right by my home modem window, I got some really great speed numbers. I saw a top speed down of over 13 Megs, and an upload of .8 Megs. This was even better than the big old home modem sitting three feet away behind a window. I have not been out and about with the moble service yet. I think I'll have my wife drive me around later today and see how it works on the go. Hopefully, those Youtube ads you see with crazy speeds while driving around town is not just while the vehicle was making a circle around the block with the tower 100 yards away in the middle. Stay tuned...