When Clearwire service came out I jumped on board. It sounded like the best thing since sliced bread as far as wireless internet service. I signed up for a 2 year agreement with Clearwire and rigged up a small Apple Base Station on the side of it making it a mobile internet device. It worked great from my office location but horrible from home. I moved across town and it got even worse, at this point I had Cable internet in my home office and Clearwire. I would take it with me to coffee shops and Starbucks and let everybody leech off of it when it did connect to the internet. Of course now that would not be necessary but a few years ago it was great. After doing this for a couple of months I received a call from Clearwire in which they explained to me that I was using my Clearwire modem at to many different locations and that I would need to upgrade to an account that would allow more locations. Anyhow, I am getting off topic…
After my 2 years were up, which felt like a 2 year sentence, I switched to AT&T and got a Wifi card which works much better albeit just as slow as the Clearwire.
There are several businesses in my local area which provide Clearwire Wifi for free to their customers. One such busienss is Coffee Creek. I frequent Coffee Creek often because they have great coffee and with free Wifi I can work from there as well. However because Clearwire continues to be a hater I can not access my home office Mac because of the way Clearwire does things.
Back to my Mac does not work because Clearwire does not support NAT port mapping. I was not able to get it to work when I was at my Father’s house who also has Clearwire. I find it interesting that through AT&T’s Wifi in Starbucks I can connect to my home Mac. Obviously this has nothing to do with Coffee Creek, or my Father for that matter. Clearwire just doesn’t get it. Because of the way their network runs I am unable to connect to any other computer using my Mobile Me account.
I do not understand why a company would produce a product and limit its capabilities to work with the popular technology that is out there. I am not complaining in hopes that somebody will comment a logical explanation as to why this is. I am just making an observation as to why many companies fail. I don’t see Clearwire going anywhere as a company because of all of the failures they have. They are not actively growing their network to provide better service in my area, they are just hoping that the people who live outside of the distance that cable and DSL providers reach never gain access to anything else. I have yet to come across a happy Clearwire customer. Clearwire has a powerful place in the industry right now to do great things if only they would do them. Instead they leave up road blocks, probably unintentionally that upset people like me that would have stood on a soap box and sang their praises.
