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Clearwire: Unlimited Means No More Than 5GB Or We Throw You Off

Phillip Dampier November 20, 2012 Broadband Speed, Data Caps, Wireless Broadband 7 Comments

Clearwire wants a divorce from customers it deems are using the wireless broadband service too much — as in around 5GB per month, despite the fact many of those customers pay for “unlimited” accounts.

Broadband Reports says several ex-customers are now complaining on Twitter about their abrupt, involuntary departure this week as paying customers, despite company promises that advance warnings would be sent if a customer was engaged in “excessive use.”

“One user excessively running heavy bandwidth applications can adversely affect the speeds and service quality for their neighbors,” Clearwire told Broadband Reports. “It is rare that we take this step and when we do it affects an extremely small percentage of our total user base. We typically contact users to notify them of this type of situation first in order to provide an opportunity to make necessary changes.”

Broadband Reports:

How much usage was considered too much? Clearwire won’t get specific, but one of the users tells Broadband Reports Clearwire informed him he’d breached 5 GB three months in a row — which frankly doesn’t sound excessive for a modern wireless network.

Clear began throttling heavy users on unlimited accounts to around 256kbps back in 2010. They’ve never really been specific about what triggers the throttled state for users, given it appears to be calculated on the fly based on local tower congestion — so what triggers throttling may be different in different markets. It’s not entirely clear why throttling these users back to 256 kbps wasn’t substantial enough of a punishment for these “fired” customers.

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Scott
Scott
11 years ago

Throwing more money at Clearwire or buying them out will be Sprint’s worst mistake they’ve made in years.

HB
HB
11 years ago

This company made the rounds in my city a few years back. They had their “reps” spam our local Craigslist every hour with promises of unlimited data and prices locked in “for life” I always found it strange why everyone was selling all the hardware “like new” after only 30-60 days of use.

marco
marco
11 years ago

It’s random people on the Internet. You have no journalistic integrity for writing about this. You have no credibility.

Racerbob
Racerbob
11 years ago
Reply to  marco

Right Marco. Phil has tons of integrity. Are you employed by Clearwire ? Phil presents facts in his articles with sources to back them up.

Paul
Paul
11 years ago

I consistently use 10-15gb of data on Clear and have not heard one peep about using too much, let alone that they are going to kick me off.

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