Clear 4g Wireless internet service in 80 cities PREPAID 1 year/6mo via BitCoin

[Littleshop]

Unplug with Clear!  We are selling a clear USB stick activated with one year of clear.com 4G internet service.  

[revised prices]
6 months delivered $299.99
12 months delivered $549.99

This price includes the service at $45 a month, the hardware and the activation fee.  Please note that you pay in BitCoin at the mtgox.com rate, not in USD!  

Please check the service map for clear.com and make sure you are in a good signal area, it is in many places but it is mostly cities and not rural areas.  

If there is interest we may offer other devices.  

It is on the front page at:
http://www.cryptoanarchy.us/store/

[SgtSpike]

I don't normally put a stick in the mud for people selling stuff, and I am sorry for having to do so, but Clear... man... stay AWAY!

They lock you in to a 1 or 2 year contract.
They have a contract auto-renew policy, so you're stuck with them for another 1 or 2 years if you don't cancel in the right manner.
They will not release you from said contract unless you call them between 30 and 60 days of contract end that you do not wish to auto-renew.
Even if you move to an area that does not have Clear service, you cannot cancel your contract.
They used to be named Clearwire.  I guess they had to rename because Clearwire got such a bad reputation.  And it's hard to google and find relevant items for "clear sucks" vs "clearwire sucks".
When I had the service, I was getting 100kbps, if I was lucky, during peak usage times.  The only time I would actually see advertised speeds (1.5mbps) was 3 or 4 AM in the morning.
Pings were also atrocious.  400-500ms was the norm, and 1000+ would happen regularly.  Often, I would have to try 5 or 10 times to even be able to load websites.
I finally had to contact the BBB before they would allow me out of their contract without paying the ridiculous ETF.


STAY AWAY FROM CLEAR.

Littleshop, I wish you the best of success in selling other items in your store.  I just felt I had to warn people about the abomination of internet service that is called Clear.

[Littleshop]

I don't normally put a stick in the mud for people selling stuff, and I am sorry for having to do so, but Clear... man... stay AWAY!

They lock you in to a 1 or 2 year contract.
They have a contract auto-renew policy, so you're stuck with them for another 1 or 2 years if you don't cancel in the right manner.
They will not release you from said contract unless you call them between 30 and 60 days of contract end that you do not wish to auto-renew.
Even if you move to an area that does not have Clear service, you cannot cancel your contract.
They used to be named Clearwire.  I guess they had to rename because Clearwire got such a bad reputation.  And it's hard to google and find relevant items for "clear sucks" vs "clearwire sucks".
When I had the service, I was getting 100kbps, if I was lucky, during peak usage times.  The only time I would actually see advertised speeds (1.5mbps) was 3 or 4 AM in the morning.
Pings were also atrocious.  400-500ms was the norm, and 1000+ would happen regularly.  Often, I would have to try 5 or 10 times to even be able to load websites.
I finally had to contact the BBB before they would allow me out of their contract without paying the ridiculous ETF.


STAY AWAY FROM CLEAR.

Littleshop, I wish you the best of success in selling other items in your store.  I just felt I had to warn people about the abomination of internet service that is called Clear.

I understand some of your frustration but...

We are not locking anyone in a contract.  I use clear daily and love it.   I have had slow service in DC but fast everywhere else.  It is a WIRELESS service, it is not going to be as good as Comcast or Fios but it certainly beats out DSL for most people. 

[SgtSpike]

Glad that you had a better experience than I did with it!  It was just the worst decision I ever made to go with them for my primary internet.

And good to hear that it doesn't involve a contract... that helps.

[opticbit]

I bought my clear stick in full and have no contract.
Some guy at best buy gave me a free mifi hotspot upgrade.
And its still $40/ mo pre paid.

[Littleshop]

You got lucky as the rate is now $45 a month.
Actually so did I.   

[kgo]

They have a contract auto-renew policy, so you're stuck with them for another 1 or 2 years if you don't cancel in the right manner.
They will not release you from said contract unless you call them between 30 and 60 days of contract end that you do not wish to auto-renew.

Two good reasons to pay in bitcoins...

[Littleshop]

They have a contract auto-renew policy, so you're stuck with them for another 1 or 2 years if you don't cancel in the right manner.
They will not release you from said contract unless you call them between 30 and 60 days of contract end that you do not wish to auto-renew.

Two good reasons to pay in bitcoins...

Exactly. 

I added a six month option as well and found out how to drop the activation fees. 

[Ricochet]

Ignoring everything else in this thread, I must comment on one statement:

They used to be named Clearwire.  I guess they had to rename because Clearwire got such a bad reputation.  And it's hard to google and find relevant items for "clear sucks" vs "clearwire sucks".

While this is true, please do keep in mind that Comcast did the exact same thing.  They're slowly trying to make "XFinity" its own brand when really it's just Comcast trying to get rid of its bad image, and in reality things haven't changed a bit.  Hell, just look at the past two/three weeks.  Mrs. Baker, who was a commissioner for the FCC board for a mere 4 months, who voted to approve the Comcast-NBC merger, just accepted a position at Comcast as a lobbyist to the FCC.  If that isn't a conflict of interest, I don't know what is.

Every ISP is evil in some way.  I say this as an intern of a national ISP (thankfully not Comcast).  I've listened to enough conference calls to realize that these organizations are entirely out of touch with reality. 

[SgtSpike]

Ignoring everything else in this thread, I must comment on one statement:

They used to be named Clearwire.  I guess they had to rename because Clearwire got such a bad reputation.  And it's hard to google and find relevant items for "clear sucks" vs "clearwire sucks".

While this is true, please do keep in mind that Comcast did the exact same thing.  They're slowly trying to make "XFinity" its own brand when really it's just Comcast trying to get rid of its bad image, and in reality things haven't changed a bit.  Hell, just look at the past two/three weeks.  Mrs. Baker, who was a commissioner for the FCC board for a mere 4 months, who voted to approve the Comcast-NBC merger, just accepted a position at Comcast as a lobbyist to the FCC.  If that isn't a conflict of interest, I don't know what is.

Every ISP is evil in some way.  I say this as an intern of a national ISP (thankfully not Comcast).  I've listened to enough conference calls to realize that these organizations are entirely out of touch with reality.  

But at least you can still visit webpages with Comcast!  And they don't try to lock you in to an auto-renewing contract...  At least, I've not had a bad experience with them in that regard.

At my current location, I have exceptionally good service with Comcast.  I always get higher than advertised speeds, they have pretty much ignored the fact that I am running a server off a residential internet connection and have used more than 1TB of upload every month for the past 7 months, despite their unadvertised cap of 250GB.

I seriously cannot imagine having worse internet service than what I experienced with Clear.  It was just awful.  Worse than awful.  It was unusable.  I would have rather had dial-up at some points.  I am more complaining about the service than the name behind it.

Comcast was like hopping on to an F1 car after riding my bicycle.  Even if I was only getting 1/100 of the advertised speed with them, it STILL would be faster than Clearcrap!

EDIT:  And I'm not trying to say that Comcast doesn't play political games with lobbiests like any other company, but IMO, they are by far the lesser of two evils.

[Ricochet]

Being able to visit any website should be a right, not a privilege.  The oligopoly of ISPs in the US would have you believe differently.  The FBI and CIA, with their powers to seize domain names, would have you believe differently.  I'm not suggesting a fear of anything and everything, but a healthy skepticism of the powers "they" claim to have.

[Littleshop]

Location is important with clear.  In some areas they are overloaded and I'm some they are way under capacity.  I get full speeds in Baltimore , laurel, NYC and Philly.  In dc my speeds are 3G like.  What is nice for portable service they beat out the 3G services at basically the same price.  

[SgtSpike]

Location is important with clear.  In some areas they are overloaded and I'm some they are way under capacity.  I get full speeds in Baltimore , laurel, NYC and Philly.  In dc my speeds are 3G like.  What is nice for portable service they beat out the 3G services at basically the same price.  

Good point - you can't take a cable connection with you wherever you go.  I was stuck with the modem thing when I had clearwire, so it wasn't very portable.

[Ricochet]

I urge everyone in this thread to regularly visit DSLreports.com - they're biased towards the consumer, but less so than any ISP-sponsored news source.

EDIT:  well crud, my own company is under attack.  Wonderful.

[Littleshop]

I urge everyone in this thread to regularly visit DSLreports.com - they're biased towards the consumer, but less so than any ISP-sponsored news source.

EDIT:  well crud, my own company is under attack.  Wonderful.

Most companies get some of that in online reviews.  Unless you service downloads magical unicorns at will someone will complain.  Many ISP's have problems but for me, comcast is the worst and FIOS has been the best. 

[Littleshop]

Revised prices down due to clear.com promotions!