One of the great things about the internet is that it allows you to have a good rant and warn others when you experience poor customer service. I signed up for clearwire broadband in November. At the time they were just starting out in Ireland and only had limited coverage - a couple of areas in Dublin, but none of the rest of the country. Their customer service was good though. There were a couple of days when I couldn’t get access to the web but calling the support line would get me straight through to their technical staff and I got the issues resolved. I started recommending them to people who were looking for broadband.

But clearwire have been expanding and it seems their customer service abilities have not kept pace. Since the beginning of this week I haven’t been able to access google talk or websites running on unusual ports e.g. 8080. When I started with them I could access any service. It seems that over time they have been blocking more and more ports. I didn’t mind when they blocked the various p2p file sharing programs, but blocking port 8080 is a bit over zealous and now its getting in the way of my work. So I decided to ring them to see what the problem is and if they can fix it for me.

The first change that I noticed is that they no longer give their phone number on their website. This is always a bad sign. Previously it was easy to find a contact number, sales number and support number. Now instead you fill out a form and wait for a representative to contact you (It turns out they show you the support number after you fill out the support request form). Not to worry, I still had the number from when I signed up so I called them. Instead of getting through to their support staff I was rerouted to what I suspect was a general call center service. I talked to someone who obviously didn’t work for clearwire. She would take my details and said someone from support would call me. Irritatingly she required my name, phone number, address line 1, address line 2, address line 3, preferred contact time and problem description. I thought my name and number would be sufficient but no, I had to complete this exercise in form filling for my support request to go through. I said my preferred contact time was asap. “Thats not one of the available options sir.”.

Anyway I still haven’t heard from them (5 days and 3 attempts later). I tried call them again. It seems that clearwire support has disappeared into the ether. It leads me to think that I should look at moving to someone else because I don’t like to pay for bad service (Although how I could cancel my subscription with them if I can’t even contact them).

So now I can’t recommend clearwire broadband in Ireland. Go with someone else.