iansltx

Sure, though I'll have to go from memory on the Clear Spot (and no pics, unfortunately) since i swapped it out this morning. Unfortunately the desktop modem (Clear Hub Express) has very little in the way of field test capabilities. You get RSSI, CNR, the BSID you're connecting to and the frequency (in KHz...channels always seem to be at xxxx.5 MHz) it's connecting at. The Clear Spot has a much heavier-duty field test screen, but you lose a lot of performance on the RF side and, I guess, the CPU side, seeing as how I couldn't push more than 7.2 Mbps through the device without issue. But in addition to the stats on the Hub, you get a more descriptive connection state readout (e.g. Connecting (3Way Handshake), CNR and RSSI numbers for both internal antennas, current and average Tx power and maybe one or two other overall stats (the site's PN, maybe? I forget). Below those listings is a table with "Neighbors" of the site. The BSID, bandwidth, CNR and RSSI are all listed. I think the frequencies are also listed, but I'm not 100% sure. I think there's a PN value per site here too. In most cases the CNR is -16 and the RSSI is effectively zeroed out, since the device is tuned to the frequency of the site it's connected to, not that of another site. If you've got additional questions about the Spot, I may or may not be able to answer them. I can plug in the Hub and answer questions on that front, though I'm 20+ miles from WiMAX here.

In some instances yes. I think that this is definitely the case for many (all?) pre-NV sites.

When a fiber cut severed Windstream and Verizon (ILEC) from the outside world a couple years ago in central TX, everyone who had ILEC backhaul (nearly all cell providers, depending on the area) stopped broadcasting a usable signal. Everyone's phones said "no service" even though, other than the fiber cut, everything was fine network-wise. Time Warner Cable has their own fiber into the area so they weren't affected (nor was AT&T 3G in Kerrville from what I heard) but apparently TWC hadn't done any AAV contracts with cellular carriers in the area at that point, so everything just went offline for eight-plus hours.

Went to Best Buy a little while ago and swapped the Clear Spot Voyager for a Clear Hub Express. Not nearly as mobile as the Spot, but I want speed more than mobility, and that's what I'm getting I have tested the service on the same three towers as before, but this time I was able to hit speeds of 10+ Mbps on all towers, with the record being 17.5 Mbps on a site that mostly serves TX-360. This was with an extremely hot RSSI (-50 or less) and a SNR of over 35. Heading to Kerrville now to see what things are like down there. My difference in experience between the Clear Spot and the Clear Hub just reinforces my opinion that 2500MHz should be used primarily in a fixed/nomadic context, where you can pump up the subscriber antenna gain to a higher level because your device can be bigger and suck more power. Capacity augmentation (i.e. hot zones) work on 2500 too, but performance is lackluster at any sort of distance.

Interesting...and this is an issue with the Voyager as well? For what it's worth, I've gotten close enough to the tower that antennas should not be an issue at all...we're talking about around 30 dB CNR here. If there's a limitation with the Spot that's keeping me from high speeds, it would be the CPU, USB port or 802.11 radio, not the 802.16 antennas. I'm half-tempted to go to Best Buy and exchange the Spot for a Stick, so that I can make sure I'm getting the absolute highest speeds the network will provide...but then again, does the current generation of Clear Stick get 12 Mbps speeds in good signal conditions, or is it too cheaply made? EDIT: Looks like I'd have to exchange the Spot for a Hub in order to get better speeds; looks like the Stick Atlas is likewise limited in its performance.

Just took a look at Clear's coverage map in my area. Wow...they have 29 sites in one screen worth of map in north Austin, where a screen is defined by their parameters, zoomed out as far as I can before I lose the site locations. Several sites are less than a mile from another site. It's phenomenal how dense you have to get on 2500MHz to cover an area. Once my laptop finishes charging, I'll have a look at two more sites in my area, both of which have wireless backhaul links installed. One site is near the closest Sprint store, and that's where I saw 12+ Mbps speeds a couple Saturdays ago. EDIT: Checked out both sites. Got within a half-mile of both, with near-light-of-sight, to get 30+ CNR. Latency and speeds were comparable to the site nearest my apartment. On the way to the site closest to the Sprint store, there were plenty of pockets where I would lose WiMAX service completely, even while outdoors on the sidewalk. I'm curious about whether the limiting factor for data speeds is the Clear Spot itself (it's not my computer; I can hit 50+ Mbps over WiFi and 100+ Mbps connected via Ethernet). I've never sen sustained speeds above about 8 Mbps when connected to the device, though peaks have hit higher. Maybe the hardware in there just isn't that strong? Can anyone else disprove me by hitting 12 Mbps on a speed test with their Clear Spot?

Makes sense. I was somehow under the impression that Clearwire was rolling out 5MHz TDD channels to start with. But that was probably an artifact of me muddling my head while reading up on 802.16 systems that I could personally deploy in 3.65GHz (most of them at the time were 802.16d, with 3.5 and 7MHz TDD channel widths). I wonder what Clearwire has the D/U ratio on its TDD carriers set as these days; I'd imagine that there was a whole lot of airlink capacity on that 10MHz carrier but backhaul for some reason was the limiting factor. Which is odd, since Clear was running around talking about how awesome their wireless backhauls were, using gear from the likes of E-Band ($25k per gigabit symmetric link). Apparently not... By the way, typo in your post...last paragraph. Should be TDD, not FDD.

I'm posting this a couple hundred feet away from the aforementioned Location #2 WiMAX tower from my MacBook, which is connected wirelessly to my brand new (from Best Buy, $50 plus tax plus a $10 day pass) Clear Spot Voyager. For some reason, when I bought the day pass, Clearwire didn't register me as having agreed to its terms and conditions, so they walled off access to everything except their own site. An hour phone call later (I hate scripted techs, and that call is one of the reasons why) I finally got 'net access. Anyway, I have 'net access now via WiMAX, in pretty much the most ideal RF conditions possible. I'm in the low -50s on the RSSI front, with a CNR (SNR?) of 32-35 (I assume numbers are in dB or dBm, as appropriate). To give you an idea of how clean my path is (clear line of sight, actually), the Clear Spot's transmit power on the WiMAX side is dialed down to -14 to -18 (I assume dBm). We're talking about tens of microwatts here! Also, the Clear Spot can't "hear" any other Clear WiMAX towers; everything in the Neighbors list (I love the field test stats on this thing!) has effectively zeroed out SNRs (-16) and RSSIs (-103). Side note: there is a Bandwidth column in the table that shows neighboring base stations, and in all cases the readout is 10,000. Wonder whether that means there's 10 Mbps of total bandwidth per base station, or whether it's a 10MHz carrier. In any case, those base stations aren't interfering with me. But what about performance? Better than 3G, but not as good as LTE. Not nearly as good. Then again, this is a device that I bought for $50 unsubsidized...I could've had it for $25 if I bought a month of service along with it online. Anyway, all traffic appears to be routed through Houston onto Level3 there, from here in Austin. A bit odd, since Clearwire could've just as easily pushed everything up to Dallas to shave off some latency, but then again the DHCP pool I'm pulling from is Houston, so i guess the AUS market is lumped in with HOU. i'll only share one traceroute because there's nothing special going on here: traceroute to google.com (74.125.227.40), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets 1 [AS8151] clearspot (192.168.1.1) 5.438 ms 2.566 ms 2.234 ms 2 [AS16586] 71-20-64-2.hou.clearwire-wmx.net (71.20.64.2) 89.581 ms 88.747 ms 94.783 ms 3 [AS16586] 64-13-74-161.hou.clearwire-wmx.net (64.13.74.161) 90.009 ms 93.934 ms 89.748 ms 4 [AS3356] xe-11-2-0.bar1.houston1.level3.net (4.78.14.25) 95.747 ms 95.027 ms 88.411 ms 5 [AS3356] ae-13-13.ebr1.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.137.138) 95.062 ms 103.476 ms 99.873 ms 6 [AS3356] ae-71-71.csw2.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.151.137) 110.222 ms [AS3356] ae-91-91.csw4.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.151.161) 98.986 ms 98.232 ms 7 [AS3356] ae-1-60.edge2.dallas3.level3.net (4.69.145.12) 95.522 ms [AS3356] ae-3-80.edge2.dallas3.level3.net (4.69.145.140) 98.993 ms [AS3356] ae-4-90.edge2.dallas3.level3.net (4.69.145.204) 103.509 ms 8 [AS3356] google-inc.edge2.dallas3.level3.net (4.59.36.14) 106.451 ms 98.722 ms 104.813 ms 9 [AS15169] 72.14.233.65 (72.14.233.65) 105.238 ms 98.129 ms 105.043 ms 10 [AS15169] 209.85.250.77 (209.85.250.77) 105.063 ms 82.747 ms 115.479 ms 11 [AS15169] dfw06s06-in-f8.1e100.net (74.125.227.40) 109.382 ms 88.545 ms 110.170 ms You'll note that pings on that route are all over the map, ranging from high 80s to low 110s. I've seen latency dip to high 50s or hit higher than 120ms, a far cry from the quality of service I've seen on T-Mobile's HSPA+, or VZW/Sprint's LTE, networks. But hey, it's cheap, right? And, all in all, not bad for a tiny hotspot (it's slightly thicker than my S3, slightly narrower and 60% shorter...but that's been covered already). What about speeds? Glad you asked. I hate to say it, but it looks like there's either backhaul or last-mile congestion on the site. Can't tell which, since I don't know how many folks in my apartment community are using Clearwire as their home internet, but color me confused when I get a large deviation in speed tests, second by second, on the connection's downstream side. Speed tests (I'm using Time Warner Cable's Austin speedtest since it's lightly loaded and bottleneck-free over to Clear) will bounce between 6 and 8.5 Mbps on the download side over the length of a test, settling somewhere in that area at the end. Upload speeds are within 100 kbps of 1.5 Mbps. Keep in mind that all these speeds are during a period where the network isn't terribly loaded: 10-11pm. I'll do more tests tomorrow. You might be wondering why I didn't break out speedtest and latency numbers by location. Well, the difference between being 150 feet from the tower and 1000 feet translates to no discernable difference in performance. Heck, standing closer to the monopole's base than the antenna cluster still didn't kill speeds much, though transmit power jumped into the milliwatt range and SNR went down as low as 15 at that point. Which is crazy, considering the rather broad vertical beamwidth and downtilt that those antennas must have to allow any kind of service that close. At location #1, inside I hovered around 0 dBm Tx power and high twenties SNR, with an RSSI in the mid -60s...and speeds were comparable to when I moved the Clear Spot out to the patio, where SNR improved by a few decibels, RSSI jumped into the mid -50s and Tx power stayed in the negative dBms. Note that the difference between outside and inside was maybe ten feet of airspace and a sliding glass door (likely without an energy-efficient, RF-destroying coating). I'll do some tests tomorrow when network load conditions are different (i.e. most people in the tower's footprint are at work or at school rather than at home). I don't expect better speeds or latencies, but I could be wrong. This WiMAX experience has been an interesting one...though the real fun will be when, a few weeks from now, I go hunting for the protection Site in Kerrville. EDIT: Ooh look, 9.13 Mbps! EDIT 2: The network is faster and more reliable when it's unloaded...getting 80-90ms pings more ofteh than not at 1am, with sustained speeds a bit north of 7 Mbps on testmy.net, 9 Mbps on other speedtests and bursts to 10-12 Mbps for brief periods on some speed tests. Not sure if I trust those speedtests though. Also, realize that this is an outside case for this tower: perfect signal, minimal load, tethered via USB to a Clear Spot. Maybe the only thing better would be to have a full-sized home modem doing the tests, but that would make field testing a heck of a lot harder.

From what I've seen, "GSM buzz" only happens on 850MHz TDMA-based systems...so TDMA, iDEN and GSM. CDMA-based systems don't do that. Nor do 1900MHz ones...I've had T-Mobile and never run across GSM buzz while on their home network (1900MHz for GSM, AWS for HSPA+ in most areas, with a few now having HSPA+ on PCS). I have seen the buzz, or something similar to it, on TDMA, GSM and iDEN phones before, all of which were in the 800MHz (SMR or CLR) band at the time. LTE should NOT be making that kind of interference pattern, and I haven't seen it on my SIII when it has been in LTE mode. Once LTE is online where I am (or where I'm visiting) I'll do some tests, but LTE's airlink is closer to WiMAX or WiFi than GSM, CDMA or even WCDMA/HSPA. I repeat, just because LTE is a 3GPP standard doesn't mean it's similar to GSM...it isn't. At all. Just like WCDMA (AT&T and T-Mobile 3G/non-LTE 4G) behaves completely differently than GSM (which is why you don't hear GSM buzz nearly as much anymore, since WCDMA doesn't do it).

Working right now on getting a Clear Spot to test out WiMAX in areas near home (using "near" in the Texas sense...so draw a circle with a radius of 2.5 hours' driving time around my location). I would use my phone, but Robert has my OG Epic now I'll likely be making use of Clear's limited-time passes (day and two-hour) to do my testing, since I have a cable connection for my main 'net access that clocks in well above what I expect to see from Clear (50M down, 5M up vs. <20M down, 1.5M up). Location #1 will be my apartment, roughly 1000 feet from a Clear monopole in NW Austin, as the crow flies. I'll test indoors and outdoors to see how much a wall or two attenuates my signal (probably a fair amount, since we're talking about 2500MHz here). Fun fact: this site is backhauled via microwave, according to AntennaSearch. Two 18GHz radios on three channels, plus one 23GHz radio on two channels, according to AntennaSearch. Wonder whether that will impact throughput... Location #2 might be pretty much under the same cell site, to see how wide the vertical beamwidth of Clearwire's antennas are. Oh, and downtilt. Location #3 will be in Kerrville, somewhere where Clear shows they have service via their Protection Site there. It may take a little while to find such a place, but I'll look for one with a good signal and do some testing. Since the site is the only one in the area, Clearwire doesn't have any wireless backhauls to elsewhere, making it harder for me to easily find the site. They also don't tell me where their tower is in that city, though it looks like it's somewhere toward the south side of town. Locations #4 and above will be elsewhere where Clear has service, either in Austin (likely) or San Antonio (less likely). I may or may not test more than the three above locations, but who knows. If I do test in San Antonio, it will be on the north side of town.

One day @ $9.99 plus two hours @ $4.99

Because I said "service" rather than "device plus service"

Exactly So my total outlay for service, ideally, would be $14.98.

Please reread what I wrote. That sale requires you to purchase a month's worth of access right then. I don't need a month's worth of access. I want a two-hour pass to test speeds in Kerrville, plus either a two-hour or a day pass to test speeds in Austin. So that's $15 worth of service, not $35 or $50 (and I'd want the $50 one because I guarantee you that speeds in both instances are going to be above 1.5/0.5 down/up)

Was in Kerrville yesterday. Since my SIII only picks up LTE 4G, I stopped by the local Sprint store to see if their E4GT could pick up WiMAX in town. It couldn't. I'll be back there in a few weeks, and will have a Clear Spot to test things out with. Speaking of which, does anyone have a Clear Spot they could loan (or sell cheaply to) me for a day or two surrounding 9/18? Doesn't need to be active; I'm just trying to get around paying $79 for the Voyager plus a month's access if I can (Clearwire is having a promo on their branded service right now). i'd grab a NetZero hotspot, since 200MB is more than enough to do testing, but that's $20 more than the Clear device.

Another piece of food for thought: better signal in 800 should make for decreased transmit power requirements, right? And switching idle carriers due to low signal would use up more power as well. So if Sprint pushes out a PRL that, for all phones with SMR CDMA support, keeps those phones idling on the SMR channel when possible, those devices end up using marginally less power than if they idled at PCS. They would also be less likely to miss calls/texts due to coverage holes, though this is balanced by the finite amount of paging space on a single CDMA 1x carrier I suppose. Calls would still end up on a PCS carrier whenever possible, but battery life should be positively impacted. AJ, correct me if I'm far afield on my understanding of the system or its ramifications. Also, I assume that I'm visualizing the VZW A-PCS-B bridge/idle carrier selection process correctly but elaboring about it wouldn't hurt...though it probably should be in another thread Side note: I wonder how much capacity a 1x channel has for SMS messages. I assume one per slot cycle per code (so around 34 per slot cycle overall?), but I could be very wrong here.

Signed. Sent from my Galaxy SIII-32GB using Forum Runner

Ah, the Touch Pro. Had that phone...keyboard was nice. Ability to run Android was nice. 640x480 screen was nice. Radio was nice, as was tethering. Yeah...that's about all that was nice The Photon Q sounds like a cool phone...particularly the keyboard bit. But that non-user-replacable battery... Sent from my Galaxy SIII-32GB using Forum Runner

If a CLEC is in the area, they may be able to demux X Mbps of EoC (stopgap) or fiber (permanent) down to T1s, albeit at a higher price per megabit to cover the equipment, I suppose. Seeing as how a T1 these days is just super-fancy DSL...

Maybe Sprint is pushing to get AAV deployed nationwide now, independent of NV deployments. So that way, when NV crews come in, they have enough bandwidth to light LTE right away, rather than having 3G-only service for awhile (ahem, Chicago).