New broadband service launches in Boston area

By adamg on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 2:27pm

I met today with some folks from Clearwire, which today launched a wireless broadband service in the Boston area. I'll have a more complete report later (and a coverage map), but for now, here are answers to questions folks asked me on Twitter:

Clearwire is working with Sprint and Comcast. It has no plans to work with Verizon or AT&T.
Clearwire does have a mobile hotspot gizmo that lets you connect an iSomething (Pad, Phone and Pod) to its network (it has a similar gizmo for PCs and other devices that can connect to WiFi)
The company has not talked to the MBTA about putting antennas in T tunnels; says it will once it finishes the buildout of its above-ground antennas over the next year or so.
The company plans to blanket the entire area within 128 first (looks to have about 60% covered now), then the area within 495. Currently uncovered areas include large parts of Roxbury, Hyde Park, Roslindale and West Roxbury and parts of Mattapan, Jamaica Plain and Dorchester.
The company is still looking for testers (will get contact info).

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Comments

Confused by one comment

By Kaz on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 2:40pm.

Clearwire does have a mobile hotspot gizmo that lets you connect an iSomething (Pad, Phone and Pod) to its network (it has a similar gizmo for PCs and other devices that can connect to WiFi)

So, Clearwire is running 4G for Sprint...but WiFi as well? And if I have an iPhone, then I'll be able to use an app of some sort to connect to their WiFi network side of things? Free of charge?

Ok, ok, got it

By Kaz on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 2:45pm.

You buy one of these and pay $25/mo and 8 iDevices can connect to it via WiFi and it then connects to the CLEAR network via 4G.

Need an MBA

By Lanny Budd on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 3:27pm.

I was thinking the other day about the decline of the newspaper industry while handing over a gob of cash to Comcast. Here I am paying the nut every month to Comcast just for the pipe, but the Globe can't get its subscribers to pay much if anything for online access. I don't want to pay for boston.com, and if they start a paywall I will just not go there anymore. Sorry, Dan Shaughnessy - you will be dead to me.

Then I thought: why didn't the Globe start up a network of its own, like the company in the story above? Give out routers. Charge $25 a month for unlimited internet and make boston.com the home page.

Every time the Globe comes

By anon on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 4:16pm.

Every time the Globe comes out with some great reporting, I want to send them money.

But drivel like photo features on the trophy wives of sports 'heroes' is embarrassing, most of the opinion columns are worthless, and they keep on making bad digital technology choices.

And they need to figure out online forums, because the service they're using is lousy, and half the people commenting have no more than a 5th grade level of intellectual development.

I'll pay $100 right now to have some fluff-producing staffer repurposed to doing real journalism. Get enough new metro bodies, and let the more seasoned people focus on bigger stories. There's enough going on for 10 times the number of Spotlight reports.

I'll pay another $100 to have a video of a Globe editor going to the house of someone who actually reads the Sox-fellating crap, and telling them that their fixation on pointless shit to the exclusion of actual civic awareness is destroying the city and this country, so go clean yourself up now, and we'll have no more of this crap.

So THAT's what the weird pole was by South and Centre!

By Brett on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 4:40pm.

Looking at the map of JP, I see they've got a "tower" slightly north of south & center. Right where, a couple of months ago, I saw a crew putting up a very odd cylinder on top of a light pole. Tada. I bet that's one of their 4G antennae!

Shame that large swaths inside covered areas are marked as "future" coverage areas, which is a pretty blatant white lie. It's obviously a map of signal strength, and some of the uncovered areas are very close to the towers. Those uncovered areas seem unlikely to ever get coverage in the near future.

some feedback

By Brett on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 4:58pm.

Their website is painfully, glacially slow in terms of response (ie, how long it takes for anything to happen) and then the loading speed. That's pretty symbolic for wireless data...

It's confusing as all hell what the difference is between some of the plans which, as far as the information presented, are identical. Similarly, there are two ethernet modems available. For the same price. With no explanation of the difference between them.

6Mbit/1Mbit is nice if you're only talking wireless, but wake up, Clear: in the home market you're competing against Comcast, which offers 12 Mbit/ 2Mbit for $45, the same price. Nevermind that Comcast delivers that speed plus a temporary as-fast-as-the-local-network-can-deliver speed boost for the first couple of megabytes of a transfer. Clear: enjoy your latency and sharing that 6mbit with everyone else in your neighborhood.

Faaaaail.

I'd like to see them fix the

By Amy on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 10:42pm.

I'd like to see them fix the 'switching problems' before they ad wi=fi. It's more important to me to get where I'm trying to go in a timely manner than to be online.