But after years and years of suing their customers with little change, the content providers have started targeting ISPs to do their dirty work. They have come up with the “three strikes and you’re out” idea, and many ISPs are beginning to implement it. The EU has let up on France so they can now implement it, Italy thinks downloading should be a crime, Ireland — and now, South Korea.

The idea being the “three strikes and you’re out” idea is simple at first. On the first occasion that a copyright holder notifies the ISP that one of their customers is infringing on their copyright, the ISP notifies the customer — first warning. The customer then can receive up to two more warnings in the same fashion after which their connection will be terminated.

The idea sounds simple and sounds like it may work, except for one glaring problem: the copyright holder is not required to provide any proof! This smacks in the face of due process.

You get accused of unlawful behavior three times by an outside business and you lose access to something you’re paying for. No trial. No requirement of proof of an actual crime. Nothing more than “you’re guilty” is needed to terminate your access to the Internet.

No provisions are made to provide the customer any outlets to appeal the accusations. In the United States, the power company cannot cut off a customer’s electricity without some kind of legal recourse. The city cannot turn off a customer’s water or sewer. While it has yet to be classified as such, the Internet is fast becoming a utility. Internet access is no longer something that’s nice to have. For many people it is the ability to communicate to family, an essential part of employment, the way to conduct finances, and a host of other facets of people’s lives. Cutting off Internet access with nothing more than an accusation is not akin to cutting off someone’s health club membership or tanning salon access; the Internet is becoming an essential part of daily life. In most areas of the U.S. there are monopolies, and, if you’re really lucky, there will be more than one option for an ISP. With these monopolies around as the only options for getting online, what recourse do customers have to get back online when they get blacklisted?

I find it interesting that the U.S. is willing to spend millions and millions of dollars of public money to make sure that every home is online and yet enact laws which make it easy to kick people offline. You can’t have it both ways.

As a side note, during my time in Japan in 2006 my ISP, USEN, had already instituted this policy of “graduated response.” They allowed a third-party company operating in China to listen in on traffic and flag customers at which point USEN’s customer service department would then call and warn me. They are always ahead in the technology game.

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That’s what the Clearwire modem looks like. Receive it in the mail, turn it on, plug the network cable in and you’re good to go. No need to schedule someone to come out to your house and set anything up. At that moment is when you’ll have reached your highest view of Clearwire, it’s all downhill from there.

There are five lights on the top of the modem to indicate how strong the signal is. I never had all five lights on but would regularly see from one to three of them. Their tech support told me that even though there were two towers nearby that I just wasn’t able to get a good signal.

I used a few bandwidth measuring sites to gauge how poor the speed was. The plan that I was on was 1.5M down and 256K up. I never saw that sort of speed over the six months of service. The usual download speed ranged anywhere from 50K to 500K and pings were always at least 100ms with +300ms expected. You can absolutely forget any sort of online gaming. On days where there were significant cloud cover the service was on par with dial-up services but with much worse outages. I also had the phone service through them which uses VoIP. Not sure what kind of compression they were using but if the phone was in use you could not surf the web otherwise the phone would suffer. A clear sign of poor bandwidth and/or lack of adequate QoS.

With Clearwire you can forget about using any of these services online:

• Multi-player gaming. Just no — not a chance.
• YouTube. Only way of watching anything on YouTube was to pause the video and let it download completely.
• Streaming radio. Forget about DI, SomaFM, Triple J. Clearwire can’t keep up with streaming unless you opt for the 24K streams of any station — many of which have stopped catering to dial-up users.
• Downloading anything in a timely fashion. Updates for Windows or iTunes would regularly takes hours to download. Grabbing your favorite Linux ISO would turn into an overnight mission. And thanks to the extremely high ping, downloads would regularly abort.
• Skype will be an interesting experience at best.
• Keeping an SSH session is nearly impossible as the ping will time it out and the bandwidth makes it appear like you’re on a dial-up connection when typing.

I’m not the only one that’s had trouble, in fact there is at least one web site devoted to sharing experiences of other Clearwire customers. Have a quick read before thinking about Clearwire.

My experience has been pretty much the same as every other person on here. Rarely got enough of a signal to even get online. Complained, got no where. Get this: One tech told this line of crap “if you have the newer vinyl double pane windows that sometimes interferes with the signal” What a crock! So I’m supposed to what? Put the receiver outside and run a cable into the house? Yeah I maybe a woman, but I’m not stupid. I was stupid enough to buy their non-existent service, but that was because THEY LIE! If there’s a class action lawsuit I want in on it.

After about six months of wasting money and being frustrated with the service, I finally cancelled. Because I was getting out of the contract early they charged me $170 for the modem and an additional $50 because I also would cancel the phone service. Entirely a rip off considering that they were not delivering on their end of the deal.

I have DSL now. Hasn’t had a glitch since the first day. I have their lowest plan but I’m able to do all the things listed above that Clearwire can’t. And I’m paying less!

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I’ve arrived on Thursday around 11pm (JST) to my apartment. Narita was fun, I sat in the waiting room listening to peoples’ conversations ー everyone assumed I didn’t understand Japanese (I am a gaijin after all). Waiting for me with the absolutely cutiest sign with my name on it (too cute actually! このサインを見たとき、「私です、これ」って言った) at Centrair were two girls ready to take me home. They both didn’t understand English much at all … instantly I was thrown in Japanese (!). でもぉー、日本語で話すのはすっごく面白いだ！初めて日本にいっても、初めて日本語でたくさんしゃべても、あのう、すっごく面白い。でもさ、ちょっと難し い、毎日毎日日本語だけで話す。懸命頑張る！

あとー、同じビルで住んでいる女に熱を上げている。ありえない。誰？秘密だよね。でも、俺は外国人だし、女は日本人なので、多分無理だ………ね。俺は日本語をよく分からないし、この女は英語をよく分からないから（笑）かっこいい。

I don’t have internet access from my place and I won’t be provided with a login to the school’s labs for another week, but there’s an internet cafe (とってもすごいだ！「マンガ店」という) and today I’ve found one of the other students who’s been here already for 6 months has internet access from his place. So here I am tonight

I have pictures, I have 時差惚け (少し), I still have money sorta, what I’m missing is the internet.

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