We've been watching WiMax backer Intel's marketing department drum up deafening hype about the technology for the better part of a decade, initially calling WiMax "the most important thing since the Internet itself." This resulted in a lot of unskeptical but bubbly news reports, starting in 2004, proclaiming that WiMax was a cable and DSL competitor before it had even really left the development gate. Half a decade later finds Clearwire as the only major U.S. player in the Mobile WiMax space, with barely a handful of major launch markets under their belt.

Clearwire's fixed wireless service has traditionally seen poor reviews from our users. Enter the company's Mobile WiMax ambitions, fueled by a new joint-venture with Sprint that's now got corporate backing from such industry giants such as Google, Intel and Comcast. So how are users responding to the freshly-funded Clear Mobile WiMax service, which the company promises to deploy to 80 markets in 18 months?

Not particularly well, according to our latest user reviews and forum comments.

The mobile version of Clearwire's service comes in multiple flavors, all of which offer on average 4Mbps/384kbps connectivity, but with different bandwidth caps. The company has been playing with pricing, currently offering (at least in Portland) a $35 Mobile plan with a 2GB cap (and a whopping $10 each additional gigabyte), a $45 unlimited plan, a $10 day pass, or a $80 a month unlimited nationwide plan. The company also offers uncapped home plans of 1Mbps/512kbps for $25, and 3Mbps/1Mbps for $30.

Except showcase tests of 6-7 Mbps seen in the Clear retail store weren't anywhere to be found, after one of our Texas readers got the new service home to discover high pings and sub 1 Mbps speeds. "I'll keep them around seeing as how Charter is the absolute pits but this is completely pathetic," says the user. Other reviews out of Texas are similar, with some users actually complaining about worse performance than Clearwire's fixed wireless service. Portland and Boise area customers are also complaining of sub-1 Mbps speeds.

Meanwhile, technical users complain that the Motorola modem Clearwire's using for the new Clear service doesn't allow the user to disable NAT or run a traceroute, something that could be fixed by firmware update.

While Clearwire has insisted they aren't competing with giants like AT&T and Verizon, that's wishful thinking, and the two giants' LTE ambitions loom large on the horizon before they've even been built. Customers on the bleeding edge often experience these kinds of issues, but Clearwire has less time than they think to establish a happy customer base, and early anecdotal impressions aren't looking particularly good. Still, happy customers are traditionally more quiet, and interestingly, reviews of Sprint XOHM (which is now part of the Clear brand) seem slightly better.

Any fixed or Mobile WiMax Clearwire customers interested in adding their experiences in our comment section below?