What’s that you say Comcast? Unlimited WiMax for fifty bucks a month is here! Really? Sounds too good to be true, right? You bet.
Three weeks ago the frustration in my office was measurable as I opened my new “WiMax U300 USB Modem” and unsuccessfully tried to install the device drivers on no less than five different PC’s. No rainbows, no happy songs or bubbles of internet came flying through the air as shown nightly on their pervasive TV marketing blitz.
Instead, I was mired in the gray and downtrodden world of the Windows device manager for hours and hours on end, uninstalling and re-installing different versions of connection managers and drivers in an attempt to get my modem to function.
After several hours of googling and forum reading, I was stuck. Nothing was working. Three different desktop PC’s and one laptop running Windows XP Professional and one laptop running Windows 7. Zip. Nada. Skunked. To be fair, Comcast openly stated they didn’t support Windows 7, but Windows XP should have been a cakewalk.
In a last act of desperation, I picked up the phone and started the hideous gulag of tech support. Three days later, I had progressed to speaking with a second tier tech who didn’t have much more to offer than the usual “I need you to reboot, then uninstall the connection manager, then re-install… yadda yadda”. No dice.
I tried to explain to him in laymans terms what was going on: When I inserted the U300 into the USB port, it would load a set of drivers for a WiMax Modem and a Beceem 3g Network Adapter. Then it would get stuck in a continuous loop of enabling and disabling the device. This would continue until I removed the unit from the USB port. The device would not activate and would not show up as “active” in the connection manager at all. Couldn’t activate it, couldn’t use it.
He took my information and said someone would be in touch “soon”. As a measure of compassion, he noted that I wasn’t the only one having this issue. He said that in the last four hours he had spoken with three other people having similar problems with device drivers, and that the first set of drivers they had released were simply “frying” modems. “God, I hope that isn’t happening again… ” he said. Yeah. Me too. So I waited. And waited some more. Two days later, I get a message in my voicemail asking for the IMEI and the ESN of my device. I call back and provide Comcast with the requested info.
Fast forward about a week. I’m standing in the shower, and it was like someone flicked a lightswitch. I was done. Had it. Tired of waiting, tired of “soon”. I knew I’d be getting a bill soon for service I wasn’t even able to use. I got out, dryed off and picked up the phone. Loved the reactions of the call center folks when they asked “And why are you canceling your Highspeed 2 go today?” Uh… well, because I’m tired of waiting and paying for your techs to figure out what’s wrong and why it won’t work – and – if I don’t cancel now, I’m going to get banged with an early termination fee. So like a gangrenous leg stuck in a bear trap, I’m gnawing it off now before it gets any worse.
As it stands right now, I’ve gone and put my other leg in a bear trap with Sprint again for 2 years of wireless 3g using a MiFi unit. I chose the MiFi device because I know it’ll work with my Win7 laptop. Bummed about the 5GB usage cap, but I’m thinking that in another six months to a year I can just do an upgrade to Sprint’s Unlimited 4g / 5GB 3g service plan after things mature a bit. In the end, both Sprint and Comcast are using Clear’s 4G wimax network and the exact same USB adapters. I hope that changes though, because in my opinion the U300 just isn’t ready for prime time yet.
