Bloomberg is reporting that in an effort to sign up people for the 4G Clear Internet service, some dealers made a conscious choice to ignore the ability of the customer to pay for the 24 months of service in the contract – and many of the accounts never paid any of their bills.
In the past two days, I’ve been toying again with getting Clearwire, when I discovered their tower is less than a mile from my house. However, even so the signal won’t be strong enough because there is a hill in the way.
One reason Clear isn’t taking off is it is TOO DAMN EXPENSIVE. They have a 4G technology that is highly efficient and fast and pricing it as if it is 2G. Their entry level data plan is $20/month – and for that you get 200 MB of traffic per month. At 1 Mb/sec (Clear goes much faster than that), you could burn through your entire month’s data in less than half an hour. Give me 2 GB of data for that price and maybe we have a deal. AT&T’s 3G wireless costs $25 for 2 GB – I know AT&T will be here next year – Clearwire, not so sure…. Why would I take that risk?
I placed my order this afternoon to switch from DSL to u-Verse 12 Mb/sec Internet. After dropping the copper voice line, the price will be about the same as my 968 kb/sec slow-as-molassas DSL.
I’m at least toying with the idea of moving the web server into my house once that is up and working. That would save about $400 a month – at the cost that your visits to this web site will be slower – and if the power goes out here, the web server will go down. If I don’t buy a UPS, lightning could make it go down permanently 🙂
uVerse has a 250 GB per month cap.