>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Heinlein <[email protected]> writes:
Paul> Has anyone in PLUGland purchased and used a mobile broadband
Paul> account? I'm interested to know your experience with the
Paul> various vendors and hardware; Linux and Mac support stories are
Paul> very welcome. I'm also interested to know what your experience
Paul> has been outside the Portland area, in other metro areas across
Paul> the country.
First, I have very little experience with Clear, only one evening in a
pub, shortly after rollout last January. But I do know a little about
it that I'll share. First, all three of the widely advertised WiMax
services in Portland (Clear, Sprint and Comcast) are running off the
same towers/radios. That is, Sprint and Comcast are simply
reselling/rebranding Clear service. As such, you can't expect any of
them to be noticably better, connection-wise, since they are all
fundamentally the same service.
As I understand it, the mobile WiMax system that is deployed in
Portland is not widely available in other cities, though they say they
are expanding. Here's the current list of cities at the Clear
website:
CLEAR is Available in:
Abilene, TX
Amarillo, TX
Atlanta, GA
Bellingham, WA
Boise, ID
Corpus Christi, TX
Killeen, TX
Las Vegas, NV
Lubbock, TX
Midland/Odessa, TX
Milledgeville, GA
Philadelphia, PA
Portland, OR
Salem, OR
Waco, TX
Wichita Falls, TX
Note that Clearwire that was deployed earlier in places like Seattle
(note the distinction between Clear and Clearwire is important), uses
an older fixed-WiMax technology, which I understand does not work with
the Clear devices. There are protocol differences.
Anecdotally, in Portland, I have heard some people who are very happy
and some people who are not at all happy with coverage where they are.
Signal quality apparently is quite variable. I haven't tried to test
that, as I don't have the service myself and probably wouldn't
consider getting it until there are linux drivers for the Clear mobile
device (a USB dongle that lacked linux drivers as of last spring).
There are Intel WiMax drivers in the vanilla kernel these days, but as
of last spring, the USB dongle that Clear was providing was not using
the Intel WiMax chipset. I got my hands on it briefly and snagged the
vendor id from the usb bus.
"Bus 004 Device 031: ID 198f:0210 Beceem Communications Inc."
My understanding is that's from a Broadcom-owned subsidiary or
something. Google is telling me there still is no linux driver for
this device available today.
I also understood that as of late last spring, you could not yet
"activate" mac addresses of devices that Clear wasn't selling
directly, so the WiMax radios in some new Intel-based laptops would
not work either, even though they *have* linux drivers. That might
have changed by now, but I haven't heard either any confirmation or
even any rumors that it has.
Basically there are two ways to use linux with Clear right now: a)
using their "home" modem, which you can interface with using cat5
(bulky to cart around with you though); or b) a wimax/wifi device that
connects to the Clear network that also integrates a wifi access
point. I guess that's nice for sharing, but perhaps a bit bulkier
than ideal.
The only other little tidbit is that a Clear representative came to
one of our PTP meetings and indicated that Clear service could be
used as backhaul for shared wifi hotspots (like a PTP node).
I have no experience at all with cellphone based broadband services,
so this post is stamped with a gigantic FWIW across it.
--
Russell Senior, President
[email protected]
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