I live off of Union Ave between 6th Ave & S. 12th and I have had Clearwire for over a month. Setup was a breeze. The Clearwire rep met me at my house, plugged the power into the Clearwire wireless unit and plugged the network cable into my Apple Powerbook. I filled out some paperwork and we were done.

Don’t get confused. This isn’t like Verizon’s EVDO or one of the other cellular services. It is faster and cheaper but not as portable. The wireless unit it the size of a cable or DSL modem and must be plugged into AC power. You will need to be creative if you want wireless Internet in your car, on your bike, in the park, etc. I can’t wait until they shrink the hardware down to a PCMCIA or express card size. I have heard rumors that engineering prototypes of such devices exist.

I like it a great deal. Click! is great but I like being able to through my Internet connection in a backpack. I provided free WiFi Internet to the Tacoma Progressive Media Conference back in October. I may be providing free WiFi Internet access to the Tacoma Area Linux Users Group at some point in the future.

Clearwire is not without issue though. The wireless connection is high latency. I have yet to run into any problem with the bandwidth provided, my needs are modest, but ping times seem awfully slow. I’m used the UW Tacoma network though so I have been spoiled. Also it seems the DNS servers that Clearwire provides are slow. It seems like it takes forever for a URL to resolve to an IP address. I’m planning on setting up a caching DNS server at my house to overcome this problem.

In my time in Tacoma I have used Click! cable internet (Harbornet and NetVenture), Qwest DSL, Comcast and Clearwire. Clearwire has been great so far. It is a little more expensive than Click! . I would mainly recommend it to people who either have an aversion to having cable installed in their home (like my roommate/landlord) or who will take advantage of the flexibility of the wireless connection.