A Clear Choice

A couple of months ago, we talked about boosting our WiMax internet signal by using aluminum foil. Getting home internet from Clear was a very hit-or-miss affair, with the signal fading or dropping in poor weather (keep in mind that we’re in the Pacific Northwets, and no that’s not a typo), but by constructing a sort of tinfoil reflector dish around our WiMax modem we were able to improve both signal strength and reliability… at least at first.

The signal was noticeably stronger after construction of the aluminum dish, and this fact impressed us enough that we were excited to share this news with the blogosphere. The idea that one could take a common household material like aluminum foil and build a device to boost one’s wireless internet service seemed so cool, so… taboo. It gave us a geeky feeling of resourcefulness, like we were on the verge of discovering a plethora of other cheap, alternative ways of improving our quality of life.

You mean all I have to do is eat vegetables and I'll never have to get a flu vaccine again?

However, our inventive euphoria did not take long to fade, and within a couple weeks of building our aluminum dish we noticed a severe drop in our signal strength. I should note that our internet service was still technically better with the tinfoil than without, although at its worst the signal had become so weak that the difference was hardly noticeable. Bizarrely, this drop in service quality coincided almost exactly with a timetable given by Clear in previous weeks to improve signal strength in our area by building new towers nearby. Despite their promises to the contrary, however, our service began an extreme downward spiral in the weeks following our last post on the subject. It appears that our failure was not to trust in tinfoil to improve on Clear’s hardware, but to trust Clear to provide a reasonable service in the first place.

Had we zoomed in closer on Clear's service map we might have noticed the tiny gray area over our 800 square foot apartment.

The service actually got worse and worse, as if the Clear Gods were punishing us mere mortals for attempting to exert some control over the realm of invisible WiMax signals, with our pagan aluminum technology. In the last couple of weeks, it was taking up to 2 hours to load a 10-minute video on Youtube. At one point, attempting to download a multi-gig file, we determined that it would actually, literally be faster to buy a plane ticket, travel to the home of the person who created the file, load it onto a flash drive, and fly back. Even at it’s best, our service was rarely better than that offered by a dial-up connection with a 28 kbps modem. I nearly jumped for joy when my download speeds peaked at 30 or 35 kbps, a fact to which no human should ever have to admit in this day and age. We were paying $35 per month for service that was slower than dial-up. It was clear that something would have to change.

How many people under 20 even know what this is?

Unfortunately, in our folly we had agreed to a long contract with Clear, and in order to get out of it we had to set up an appointment with a service technician whose job seemed to consist entirely of (1) asking us stupid, generic, and insulting questions over the phone, to the tune of “Is your modem plugged in?” and (2) asking us stupid, generic, and insulting questions in person, while simultaneously ignoring our responses because he was right goddamn there and could see with his own eyes how shitty our service was, through no fault of our own. It was a hassle, but by the time the Clear representative had actually come out to our apartment and verified the lack of a reasonable internet experience, getting out of the contract wasn’t really far off.

The moral of the story? Even creativity and tinfoil can’t solve every problem. Unless you need internet access on-the-go and you plan on “going” mainly through large sunny fields within range of Clear’s towers-or-whatever-it-is-they-have, just go with Comcast, Verizon, Qwest, or one of the other umpteen Cable or DSL internet providers in your area. It may cost a little more, but we’re willing to pay $10 a month extra for download speeds which are literally 750 times faster than what we had with Clear.

Lipstick on a pig