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AT&T Microcell (aka femtocell)
shmokes:
I set one up in my in-laws' house today and it's pretty remarkable. Admittedly, I haven't used it enough to assess it's long term reliability (it's been running for about six hours), but what I've seen so far has just been a solid 5 bars of cell reception throughout the entire house where usually I had no services at all.
For those who don't know, the Microcell is a miniature cell phone tower that routes your calls over your broadband connection. The few calls I have made and received so far have been crystal clear.
For what it's worth, I called (pretending to be my father-in-law) and asked if there was anything I could do about my complete lack of reception in my home (I already knew about the Microcell, but I played dumb in the beginning). I told them that Verizon works fine in my home (true), and that I switched because my kids were on AT&T (also true), but that the sales person assured me that there was coverage in my area (there is, just not in my home . . . you can get a signal on the road just in front of the driveway or on the back porch). The girl told me about the Microcell and said she could knock $50 off of it, bringing it to $149. I told her that was too expensive and that I would rather pay the $125 early termination fee to switch to Verizon which would produce the same result. But she said it would be $125 per phone, bringing it to $250 so I asked to talk to a supervisor to have the fees waived. He was an ---uvula--- right off the bat, but quickly relented and said that he would give it for $149 and put a $100 credit on the account, making the final price $49. Not too bad.
leapinlew:
I have terrible reception on mine and I make sure my new phone can do WIFI calling or UMA.
Wifi calling on Android is awesome.
polaris:
vodafone do them over here, i'm really impressed with it, and we get them free ;)
shmokes:
I may be backtracking on my initial positive review. My phones are regularly refusing to connect to it, preferring instead to connect to a cell phone tower, even though the phone my have only one bar or no service at all. In order to get the phone to reassociate with the Microcell I have to pull the battery and reboot, and even then it sometimes doesn't connect.
Tech support recommended that I get new SIM cards for my phones, but the lady I was talking to obviously had absolutely no idea what was going on so I'm not especially optimistic that the solution will actually solve the problem. I'll know soon enough, I guess. But I may end up returning the Microcell.
polaris:
had mine 6 months, maybe 2 or 3 times i've had to reboot the iphone to get the 3g signal, i would give the new sim thing a try, i'm sure you can get them for free from your provider, i have had issues solved by upgrading to a newer sim card in the past but for the life of me cant remember what the issue was.
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