Adventures in Frustrationville! – User Submission by Bryan D.

Our office has used clearwire (internet only, thank God) for several years now and we were recently notified that we were going to have to upgrade to the new national 4g network. Then one day about two weeks ago our internet was simply turned off. Confused and frustrated we checked our network, and all our hardware to discover that our clearwire modem was no longer receiving a signal. After calling tech support we were informed that we had to upgrade our internet package and modem. My boss, the brilliant man, informed them that since we were mid contract and were current on our monthly payment, they could not simply shut us down and force us to pay them more money. After many heated words with several different customer service folks they eventually agreed to let us upgrade at no cost since it was against our will, and quickly turned on our existing modem until the new one arrived. Last Thursday, the brand new 4g modem arrived, so we plugged it in and got the whole system set up. We noticed right away that our connection was much worse with the “faster” modem. Certain websites wouldn’t even load because they “Timed Out”. Confused and frustrated (again), we called the clearwire tech support line, and they told us that since we were able to connect (at all) to the internet that the problem was on our end. This was very hard for me to believe because everything was working smoothly before the new “faster” modem was up and running. But, i went through the motions with the tech support folks. I reinstalled the newest firefox, cleared the cache, turned off all the firewalls we had (which were doing next to nothing to begin with), still nothing was working. Then on monday we called in a local tech support guy who normally helps us troubleshoot our IT problems, and after an hour he told us that our system was fine and that it was a problem with clearwires bandwidth. So yesterday morning (no longer confused, just frustrated) I called clearwire tech support again to explain the situation. I tried to tell them that it was not a problem on our end and that we wanted to either get a new router, or be switched back to the old one. After they explained it was impossible to switch back and assured me that it could not be a problem with their network or router because I could access the internet. After walking through all of their troubleshooting steps again I was instructed by my boss to just get a new modem from them. The tech support guy i was talking to was hesitant but said that we could do that after we paid a restocking fee. At this point my boss was furious, so I handed the call over to him, and he informed the poor guy on the other end that if they didn’t get us up and running with a new modem that they were going to loose our business forever. Once again, reluctantly the guy on the phone agreed, waived the fee’s and set up an exchange of our “faster” modem for a new one at the local store. I quickly drove down and swapped out our “faster” modem, for the next generation modem that was even “faster”. Got back to the office, and the same thing happened. My boss called back this time, and laid out the situation from beginning to end, and thats when we finally got an answer. The clearwire tech on the other end got really quiet and admitted to my boss that their new network was overflowing, and they were dealing with this sort of problem all over. The tech then asked if we still had our old router, which we did, and quickly got us set up on the old system (the system that I had been told earlier in the day was impossible to go back to). And thats my story of when I visited Frustrationville, via the road that clearwire made and forced us to walk.