Bye-Bye, WiMax? You Won't Be MissedBye-Bye, WiMax? You Won't Be Missed

I'm ready to throw my WiMax modem and wireless card out the window and cancel my contract with Sprint or Clearwire or whoever's handling service these days for Xohm. (Updated below)In the last month alone, I've spent five or six hours on the phone with Xohm customer service. Nobody can tell me what's wrong with my connectivity, and they can't send anybody out to my house to help, because they don't have any in-home customer service people on payroll. That's something I hope Clearwire will fix.

My connectivity has become horrendous as of late. This all started sometime in December or January with a few intermittent outages, but it's done nothing but get worse since then. I guess that decision I made to drop Comcast for Xohm wasn't so great after all.

Some days are worse than others. However, as I write this, I have no Internet. The modem signal has become unpredictably intermittent, and went out probably several dozen times today. Even when I have a signal, it's weaker than it was before this mess started a month or two ago. And when I don't have a signal, the modem and wireless card are giving me mixed feedback that I'm sure doesn't help matters when dealing with tech support guys over the phone.

There are four lights on the left side of the bottom of the modem: a wireless signal light, and three bars like those on a cell phone that indicate the strength of the signal. When the signal goes down, sometimes, all the lights just go out. Other times, the signal strength lights stay on but the signal light itself flashes on and off. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason.

When I do have connectivity, download speeds are down to anywhere between 600 Kbps and 1.15 Mbps, which is worse than I might get with DSL. Upload speeds? They're so slow that Speedtest.net tests don't even calculate them, nor do other online bandwidth tests. Ping times are up to between 225 and 300 ms. Forget using VoIP… it turns into an echo chamber.

Meanwhile, the wireless card continues to say that it has a little bit of signal. The signal light on the card stays green, and the Xohm connection manager application shows several bars of signal strength. However, the wireless card won't even connect inside my house anymore.

Before, it used to connect and then strangely briefly disconnect after an unpredictable length of time, but at least I could easily reconnect. Now, I have to go outside the house to even get online with the wireless card. That sucks, because I never have been able to get my wireless router working properly with the modem I have, so the wireless card was the only way I had of getting online wirelessly in my house.

So far, it seems like there are three possibilities for what's going on: either there's intermittent signal interference from an unknown source, both my wireless card and modem are bad and need to be returned, or there's something inside my house here that's causing me trouble.

None of the proposed solutions sounds particularly attractive. The first would have me return both devices for new ones, which would temporarily set me back about $140 since I'm returning them more than 30 days after purchase. In that case, I'll have to send my receipts to Xohm in order to get a refund that would take weeks to receive. I'm not even sure this would work, because it seems more like a network problem than a device problem: the wireless card works fine outside.

Today, the tech support guy recommended a new solution: spend more money on another device. He said I should buy an external antenna, but when I asked him which one or where I would buy said antenna, he said Sprint doesn't sell them and then proceeded to search Google for compatible modems, told me what he searched for, and then what to buy. Too bad the item he told me to buy isn't protected against the outdoor elements and therefore would be a waste of $44.95 after the first rain. The weatherproof outdoor antenna would set me back $120, and required my own research to find it.

Oh, and for all my problems, Sprint's only giving me $15 credit toward next month's service. So, yeah, unless somebody comes to my house to help me out here, I'm pretty much done with this.

Update Tuesday morning: I'm not sure why it happened, but last night at about 8 p.m. I started getting a flurry of calls from Xohm and Clearwire letting me know that network engineers were on their way to my area to do some testing of the network around my house both last night and then again this morning between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m., and that they might call me to let me know what they found once they're done.

I can only hope that they didn't just read this blog, and instead are acting out of either normal procedure or because after writing this, I called the local computer shop where I bought the modem and wireless card to complain. Upon my call, the guy on duty there sounded annoyed at the trouble I was being put through and told me that he'd call Xohm on my behalf. Either way, I'm happy somebody may be finally coming out here. I'll update again once I hear what they have to say.

Of course, today I wake up and the network connection doesn't seem quite so awful, at least on the modem. I've been kicked off the network only once this hour from the modem connection. As always, though, the wireless card is a different story. It was able to sign on this morning, but got kicked off the network fairly quickly once and then the second time got back on but the computer continued to insist it was still online despite never being able to load any webpages.