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October 30, 2009

Xohm in Baltimore: Is this thing still on?

Interesting post from Robert Wray over at MP3car.com, pretty much saying that Xohm has shut down its WiMax broadband internet service in Baltimore to prepare for the relaunch of the service as Clear (a new company.)

Have people been disconnected from their Xohm service? Let me know what your experience has been like lately. I'm trying to reach some Sprint officials to get some clarity.

Update 1: A clarification Wray emailed me to say that Xohm is still up for current customers, but not ones who may have been intermittent users of the service. Also, Tweeter @tothepeople tells me his Xohm service still works.

Posted by Gus Sentementes at 10:11 AM | | Comments (9)
        

Comments

XOHM is working for me better than ever. Awesome customer service.
I live in Beverlly Hills

I signed up for XOHM in August and it was great in the beginning. Jump to November, and I've been buffering an 8 minute youtube vid of top chef for about 25 minutes now, so you can see how far XOHM has come. It seems like with the switch over to Clearwire soon, XOHM just doesn't care anymore.

Oh, and I just did a speed test with toast.net and managed a 70kb throughput. XOHM really is delivering a fantastic 56k service.

I live in Parkville and I've been having no problems at all. (Using it right now, in fact.) I've also had occasion to use it in other spots around town without any issues.

Clear is the name that they've always had for the same service in Portland, OR, which was the other breakout city. If you look at the new Clear coverage map, however, there are several states across the country with service, but Maryland isn't listed as one of them.

A follow-up: I just got off the phone with the Customer Service guy at Xohm and he noted that, while the service will be converting to Clear, it should not have any effect on existing customers. There may or may not be a change to equipment (he wasn't sure about that), but he indicated that it would be an exchange program. This is all supposed to take place over the next 2-3 months. Overall, people who have been using the service should not experience any interruptions.

Ashwan: Speedtest.net yielded just under 5MB/sec download and just shy of 0.5 MB/sec upload, through my wireless router.

I've been using XOHM for the past 11 months in both downtown Baltimore and downtown Washington.

As Ashwan said, in the beginning, (this time last year) the service was fantastic, with over 8MB/s. Now, in Washington, I've completely lost service, and in Baltimore it has slowed down to barely half of its previous speed. When I called, they said they were in the process of switching their networks over, and that we would all receive an email when it was time.... so: do I wait, with little connectivity now, or do I switch to someone more reliable?

I called Xohm from Oct 2 to Oct 9th, received 20 different stories. Called occasionally between the 9th and today. Today I get another story: no changes until december.

So, if you were like me, who has two laptops with Xohm cards and did the $5 per day, your out-of-luck until December.

What makes me extremely upset is this: absolutely no notice, when I called, no offers to help (the person today said they could have done something last month... however at that time I heard that nothing could be done).

I'm probably done. It's pathetic.

Well no notice is an understatement!
i was one of the unfortunate people to buy an xohm device the day after the started to transition to clear. I tried to activate my product for over a week before customer service knew what was going on. When I went back to the Kiosk where I purchased it at in mondomin mall it was all abandoned. Long story short I got my money back and am still waiting to hear when you will be able to get this service.

I've been a Xohm subscriber for about a year now (live in the Canton area, Baltimore) and haven't experienced any problems mentioned above. I still average 5-6MB down via speedtest.net. I did, however, receive an email today outlining the switchover to Clear which will be occurring on Dec 2nd. They will be requiring a mandatory modem exchange which is free.

For those having issues, remember that your modem will work best near a window where it can acquire 3 bars of signal strength.

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About Gus G. Sentementes
Gus G. Sentementes (@gussent on Twitter) has been writing for The Baltimore Sun since 2000. He's covered real estate, business, prisons, and suburban and Baltimore City crime and cops. He was one of the first reporters at The Sun to use multimedia tools and Web applications -- a video camera, an iPhone -- to cover breaking news. He hopes to cover Maryland geeks and the gadgets and Web sites they build, and learn -- and share -- something new every day.

Gus has a wife, a young daughter and two feuding cats. They live in Northeast Baltimore.
Follow @gussent on Twitter
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