Clear Internet

Review for Clear Spot Mobile Wifi Hotspot Devices:
[The Good]
The reason why I gave this company a 2 star rating is the following.
This company is great for those people who don’t have a cell phone or can’t afford to get one. But do have a iPOD Touch or Tablet or even a chromebook or something that can wirelessly connected to a device such as «This Clear Device» that can go on the internet.
This device serves them a good purpose. Those struggling to make ends meet and just need some form of way to connect to the internet with their portable device to access their email or Skype to keep in touch with friends and family via your device app’s.
This device serves that purpose well. It is also affordable for those not earning much in income or people on a low budget.
[Now for the Bad]:…
This service is slow, connectivity is 2G most of the time, and you will get drop signals if you are on the go (basically moving like walking).
Certain periods of time every month you will get 4G service, once you use that time, it WILL
drop down to 2G slow speed connections and you will experience doggy service.
This service works on repeater module connectivity that are mounted all around NYC.
like small towers., it leases those repeaters from the big boys and offers the service to customers for lower rates.
[Other Thoughts]
Again, this service is intended for those with very limited resources that need desperate connection to the internet to keep their life running in this day an age of 2016 where everyone is on the go and on mobile devices and the world is changing into an electronic world.
Do not expect super speeds like the big boys such as Verizon, T-​Mobile, Sprint and AT&T.
this service is 2 steps below that quality.
Think of this service like this:
Verizon, T-​Mobile, Sprint and AT&T = [2016]
Clear = [1999]
Get the point? :)

I liked not giving TWC or Verizon any more of my money. Service is decent enough; I have had little service interruptions but speed is way slow when viewing videos. But now they are stopping service end of October ’15.

I wasn’t going to write this review. Not because I did not want to but because I’m using CLEAR and forgot my password and knew it would take at least 5 – 10 minutes to get through the process because this service is SLOW. And guess what? it did! but I feel it was my rightful duty to warn you guys about signing up for this service.
It’s always been slow; extremely slow. I call it 66K because it’s just a step above the old school 56K dialiup. I will however give it to CLEAR, they figured out how to charge 100 people for the same line made for 1 person. Ever drank a frozen milkshake with a coffee stirrer… you’re not going to get much milkshake and hence, with CLEAR, you will not get much content.

we dont have a TV or a cell phone contract so Clear was a godsend! We checked to make sure that we had signal near us in North Jersey and it works great!
50 bucks a month !

Do NOT use this service. No star (instead of 1 star) should be a ratings option!
Any other internet provider has to be better and will be cheaper. I was a Clear customer in Manhattan for over 3 years at $ 45 a month. After 2 years the service deteriorated (prob around the time they merged with Sprint). BTW the Clear cell tower is literally outside my apt. building. My calls to customer service involved long wait times and long discussions. I received inaccurate information 100% of the time and I couldn’t understand the rep’s English about 50% of the time. I would then call again and again until Clear finally gave me service at $ 20 a month for 6 months (after I bought new equipment). When the service didn’t improve using the stronger modem I finally had enough and cancelled. Cancelling was not easy. First I was told you could not cancel in advance. Finally I was «allowed» to cancel but Clear charged my account this month anyway. Even after sending me an email in May confirming my account would be cancelled. I don’t know if Clear is unethical — but I am positive that they are incompetent and probably have too many customers using their bandwidth.

This is the worst internet ever, piece of junk. Its just as bad as dial up. Even on the clearest days its slow. Dont waste your $ cause it sucks!

Basically, this is the worst internet service I’ve ever paid money to use. With speeds reminiscent of AOL dialup (and an equally long delay to connect), this company charges a boatload of money for 4G service that it just doesn’t deliver. Modem just wouldn’t connect to ANY internet connection most of the time, and I nearly resorted to a key, kite and aluminum foil hat in an attempt to download email.
Like any other company that doesn’t care about providing service, canceling was a journey through the ridiculous. A very charming lady in a third world call center did answer almost immediately, though the crappy VOIP connection and her thick Spanish accent made it hard to understand what she was saying. Or were there chickens in the background?
You will be put on hold multiple times and for no actually good reason. They will offer you lots of deals to stay a customer. Hold your ground, keep saying no politely, and you too can walk away from the murkiness that is Clear.

THE ABSOLUTE WORSE THING TO EVER HAPPEN TO ME! Sure prices are great and the service and connection may seem fine in the beginning. But a few months into it my connection went crazy. It constantly went off and on all through out the day. Then once I started calling to fix the situation. 1 I never could understand the person 2 They always ended up hanging up on me and 3 they would tell me to do one thing and then something else and even talking to a supervisor does not help. I also wanted to just get a new modem and one person said they don’t do that then another said they do but you have to pay for the 50 dollar shipping and you may or may not get your money back. Geez what a waste of time! Don’t do it! Pay extra with somebody else!

I had Clear for two years and used it in my homes in NYC and Florida and it was OK… not great, but acceptable. Then, in past two weeks, I would have internet for about two minutes, loose for about 5 seconds, get again, loose again…
THEN
Called them, could not understand the first person as her english was that bad. Called back, had to go through the whole ID stuff again. Despite fact I did a hard boot and tried different locations in my apartment, did it again without success… another 1 hour wasted. Next day, tried the chat, same round around.
THEN THE MISTAKE
Maybe it was just my modem. Decided to order a new one even though it would force me into a more expensive monthly plan. Guess what. Exact same problem. It’s not the modem, it’s their lousy signal.
THEN THE RUN AROUND
All the complaints about trying to return as above.
Wasted about 4 hours of my life on this crappy service whose executives are so stupid… a few extra dollars in their service department could go a long way… They are so programmed and unable to deviate from their program.
DO NOT BUY!!!

The internet download speeds were all right at first, then they got TERRIBLE. Storms or even thick clouds? No service. No refunds were furnished for periods of no service either.
Cancelation was a huge hassle: they don’t let you cancel by mail or online, and they insist that you call a cancelation department, which puts you on hold a lot and gives you the run around with exit interview questions and offers to keep you signed up.
Worse, once you are connected to the cancelation department the volume on the telephone drops 100%. You have to basically crouch over your telephone with the speaker on max volume — I don’t know if this is intentionally obstructive or merely incidental being that, as one gathers from the service reps’ accents, they’ve outsourced this department to the far side of the moon or some region of outer mongolia where the telephone lines are falling apart.
Take away: no matter how desperate you may be to avoid the Time Warner/​Verizon oligopoly, Clear is worse — in fact I understand they are subsidiaries of Sprint anyway, or that sprint owns them in NYC, so you so may as well just deal with the parent company.

Absolute worst ever
The custoemr service is terrible and the internet service itself always drops out. A total scam. Please don’t wste your money. They try to lock you into a two year contract for terrible service. I will never recommend this anyone.

Absolutely terrible internet connection. The download speed is much slower than basic cable internet but slightly faster upload speed. Whenever there is snow or heavy rain, I lose all connection for the entire day. Recently, I would randomly lose connection for hours at least once a week.
I am considering to cancel my service before the contract expires. It is simply unacceptable.

I detest. No, I abhor Clear Wireless.
If you’re a person that is sucked in by the (fake) promotions and promises, like I was, I feel great sorrowful pains for you. Because Clear Wireless are effing LIARS.
I became a Clear subscriber because DirecTV had a great special for people that signed up for both services. Honestly, I wanted VIOS, but my part of Brooklyn hadn’t gotten them yet.
Now, I wonder why I didn’t just wait. I think to myself. Maybe I could have just used my phone? Maybe? No, unfortunately, I couldn’t. And supposedly (according to their website) Clear was the best choice for me. How I would loathe the day…
Everytime I truly needed my internet to not fail (think work related), sure enough, my download speed (according to
) magically downgraded. It was 0.27 (on average over month). And that was the number I got from the website that Clear themselves recommended (
). And this is when they promised 4G.
This entire runaround makes me feel like there are a thousand fire ants feasting on my lady parts. And the sad thing is, is that it would be considerably less painful than dealing with Clear’s internet service. the capping and the throttling. Which are both well documented on the site
Give me a thousand fire ants any day. because my boss expecting better? Yeah, not worth it. Thank you, Clear, for costing people their jobs because you felt you need to «throttle» a customer that paid for unlimited internet access.
This is why you now have so many lawsuits against your company. I just wished I had heard of these things sooner.

Trust me. If I could give less than a star for this company & its service I would. I’m now highly suspicious of it’s entire set up, since I’m pretty sure that I’ve spoken to the same customer service rep every single time I’ve called. His name is Angelo just in case you’re curious.
First off, don’t believe a word they say about 3G or 4G service. Its an outright lie.
will verify this to you. Most days I didn’t even get above 1Mbps for download speeds and went as low as 0.19 Mbps pretty regularly. Upload speeds stayed between 0.60 to 1Mbps.
I’ve since changed to Optimum online & imagine my glee & surprise when I’m getting download speeds as high as 50Mbps, and upload speeds of 7+Mbps. That’s 50 times faster than before… for just about the same price as before.
I have a feeling that this company is going to be failing rather soon. They had several stores around the city, including a store in Union Square that all of a sudden closed without warning and now they are running «business» out of Best Buys. I assume this to cut down on overhead cost now that customers are probably lining up around the corner to dump their modems & cancel their service.
They rely heavily on automated customer service, which will give you a headache, when all you want to do is talk to a living person… or Angelo. Then the automated service will claim to be «pinging» your modem so that you can get online… which is hilarious to me considering that when I made that phone call the modem I had from them was sitting happily disconnected in a box on my bed. Angelo tried so hard to hustle me into staying with them, trying to give me a deal of a month of free service, or just plain wait me off the phone. I had to be very firm with him and told him to charge me the outrageous $ 80 cancellation fee & be done with it.
He heard in my voice that I meant business. I’ll let you know if they actually send me the cancellation email. He might have said 10 weeks rather than 10 days. I may have to find legal services to deal with this mess.
So save yourself the hassle & the madness. Stay clear of Clear Wireless
UPDATE: Clear has written me an email confirming my cancelation for a service I didn’t even sign up for. It reads literally like this:
” Dear Janelle B
your Hardware Protection Program was
canceled on your account.
Dear Janelle B, You can contact our Customer Care Center
at 1−888-Clearwire if you require additional assistance.
Thank you,“
Hardware Protection Program? Is that code for sh*tty internet service? I guess I may have to call my bank & tell them to block all future charges from Clear just in case.

Welcome to Clear… where speed is slower than 2G and customer service is outsourced to a monkey zoo garden in Kopalompakcito Island.
If you decide to go with Clear, then you’ll quickly see how much money and time you’ve wasted.
Ping is typically around 80−120ms, and uplink is very commonly slower than 2G– and around 4 – 5:30am you may achieve fast 3G speed… *IF* you’re lucky.
Hop on over to Clear’s Facebook page and see how they truly stack-​up.

Ever hear of Dell Hell? Consider Clear Internet Dell Hell’s hell. Long story short, after Irene my service blew out never to return only to evolve into a two+ week nightmare of sitting in Clear stores and getting sucked into a maddening cycle of sending-​returning modems in an attempt to resolve the outage. Customer service was friendly but essentially useless — some seemed «knowledgeable» while others seemed not to pay attention gauging by the number of times I had to repeat myself.
Collectively all any of them could offer was a «ping» to my modem (s). Again, useless. I especially loved how at THE END of the every call, customer service would ask the city of my birth to verify security. After going around in mind-​numbing circles for over two weeks, without home internet, I cancelled my service. My head still hurts.

Note that I live in the LES where CLEAR seems to have a great signal. After years with Time Warner and after having my «appointment» rescheduled several times after my last move, I finally called it quits with Time Warner and after a friend’s suggestion, decided to try CLEAR.
I don’t own a TV. I don’t have cable. I didn’t even have a radio and so without internet, you can imagine what kind of life I was living. Luckily for me, the LES is bustling with life.
With the help of their online chat tool, I went ahead and ordered the Rover Puck with a 2 yr contract (and the ability to cancel within the first month). I’m a heavy Netflix user and my biggest fear was bandwith capacity. I have had no problem so far and can barely tell the difference between CLEAR and my old TWC cable set up. My Netflix Instant Queue takes mere seconds to buffer into streaming movie. Now this might be due to my geographical location. Maybe it’s b/​c CLEAR is still not too commonly used but I am not complaining.
I haven’t taken the Puck with me around town/​travel but I definitely will to check out how it might behave in Central Park and on the UWS and wherever else I might possibly want to watch Netflix.
Installation was a breeze and I’m recommending this to all my friends looking to switch from TWC. Just check with CLEAR to see what the coverage in your area is like first and then take advantage of the fact that you can cancel within that first month.

Clear has extremely deceptive business practices and terrible customer service. I signed up March 2011 it took over 2 weeks to receive my modem because they did not include my apt # in the first shipment and had to ship it again. I only used the modem at home and the service was extremely slow. I called and was told to check the signal on the modem and position it in a area of my apartment to get a better signal. When I signed up online it stated a 30 day trial period but when I inquired during this call I was told only 14 days.
I gave it a few more days and cancelled on ⁴⁄₈. They received the modem back on ⁵⁄₁₀. The called me on July 18^th to say they assessed a Non-​Return Fee of $ 70 plus tax on 7÷14÷11 due to the Modem being return 30 days past the cancellation date.
They wanted me to pay the full cost of the modem even though it had been returned to them. When I first asked to have the charge waived the rep said he could only waive half.
After requesting to speak to a supervisor, he put in a ticket to have the full amount waived. I verified that the full amount was waived as of today.

Clear is not for everyone. If you need fast Internet on the go, then their current 4G network is probably the most practical solution for most people, and may be the best in its class (this week).
Unless you are a very casual user, it’s best not to rely on Clear as your sole connection. Their home service borders on unacceptable. Some days the speed is so-​so, other days can bring slow downloads or no service at all. Time Warner’s cable modem speeds are literally 10X faster.
There have been a few serious network outages recently that have made their 4G service unavailable. Tech Support is quick to say that they are diligently looking into it, but they never come through with status updates.
Also, a tower went out of service in my neighborhood late last week. Clear is aware of the issue, but has no time frame available for repair.
Their customer service, while reasonably friendly, gives varying and conflicting answers on many basic questions, such as the price of certain packages. Your first bill may be incorrect.
If you have home phone service that you would like to port into Clear, forget it. 212, 646, and 917 (not sure about 718) numbers cannot be ported in due to a reason that is way to complex to explain here.
So, you’ve heard the bad. Here’s the good:
— 14 day trial period is available — this is VERY USEFUL to determine if Clear is for you.
— The 4G mobile Internet service has spotty, but extensive coverage in Manhattan, and great coverage an many other large metropolitan areas throughout the US.
— For an additional $ 10 per month you can fall back to 3G service where 4G is not available. This means that apart from the subway, the Internet is almost everywhere you are.
— Early termination fees are only $ 40. Compare that to the major wireless carriers.
— The mobile wifi device that they offer is spiffy, customizable, and easy to use.
— Many plans are available in a wide range of prices.

I came here with high hopes. When I purchased my Ipad, the Apple store suggested I check them out, as they offer an «ispot» 4G mobile wireless router. They were very nice in the store, the price was right and there was a 14 day trial period. Done.
The equipment arrived promptly the next day, charged the mobile router, and thought I was off to the races. Not so fast. I can’t get a good signal ANYWHERE. Tried for a week, both at home in Manhattan and at my office in Brooklyn.
I called to cancel and return the equipment 7 days after receiving it. They told me I can send the equipment back, but that they will not guarantee that I will receive a refund. Was told they would email me a return label… it never came. 3 calls, and I’m told there must be an issue with my email, although I continue to get their newletters in my email.
This may turn out to be a $ 130 mistake, but I’m not going to give up.
BEWARE.