interesting

Clearwire & Sprint and everybody who's part of the new wimax venture that I think is actually being called "New Clearwire" (yeah that worked out great for new coke) but the idea actually has me intrigued. Any device, more or less. Any application, more or less.

Now, I've been a Clearwire user for just over a year. I was angrily disatisfied with the service when I first signed up. No torrent would go faster than 3K/s. Other downloads faired better. I'd get bursts of 300K/s... for maybe 5 minutes at a time. It would throttle down to a solid 90K/s. It stayed there I'd say 90% of the time.

I download Sabayon GNU/Linux DVD's everytime they release. Including all of their Beta "Loops". I have a modern laptop with 3d, hdmi, dvd dl, bluetooth all kinds of lil' gizmos. Everyone of them has worked out-of-the-box for 6 releases so far. But it's a lot of downloading every time there's a new release to try out. All legal, and well supported on BitTorrent to make the download as distributed and painless on everybody as is practicable.

I had originally written how things were currently still the same here in Clearwire land. It would seem, however, that things have changed drastically in the last week or two. I've been fairly busy with work and having a wife and two kids and what have you... and haven't really done any large downloads. There was, however, the release of Sabayon 3.5 Loop 3. So it's time to download a new DVD. So I started grabbing it while I wrote... all of this.

Things are getting better, it would seem. I know get the usual start-out and happy little bursts of 300K/s or so and there's still the usual 90K/s cap for most of the transfer. But it seems to, almost entirely randomly, jump on up to 150 or so for a bit. Often enough to keep it down to probably 8 hours for the DVD. A lot better than the last two or three I've downloaded since signin' up with Clearwire because I could use it today and I liked the idea of taking it school so I didn't have to use the College's wifi.

If this new performance is a sign of where the New Clearwire (Nuclearwire?) heading on the any device, any service, any content promise... then... man I'm sold and on board as long as BitTorrent starts behaving. Let the Copyright holders handle enforcement. They already have people contracted for that. I had questions about the company in the begining and didn't feel any happier when I saw Comcast in the list of people possibly involved in this deal.

But if they do it, amen. They did say lawful referring to the service and devices. I'm fine with that. I fully expect that this is the answer to all of our bitching about throttling and traffic shapping. They'll just be all out millitant about AUP inforcement. That'll definitely be a document to read real carefully before signing up.

Bandwidth caps would be annoying. I see a lot of ISP's going that way. Too many. If you sell me 6m, I get to use 6m. If I have a reason to generate or download as much traffic as I've paid to, I can do it... even if it's for every single second. I'm not going to, but that's what the connection is for. I'd make my 28.8K dedicated static PPP connection do for weeks on end back in the day. Downloading a new GNU/Linux distribution took days and days. Then there were those 3 or 4 boxes of floppies to dd.

Geek crap is data intensive. All my GNU/Linux work these days involves source, and patches, and git trees, and I mirror a lot of content locally for on the go stuff. Like project gutenberg and tons of docs stuff that needs to be kept up-to-date. It adds up.

But it's all perfectly legal and has a positive net impact on the internet community as a whole. Especially with GNU/Linux making such great in roads into the mainstream these days. The world is really starting to see the value of software built by people who care because they want it to work for them... and my testing helps and it would make my life easier.