About four years ago, I put a low-powered cell repeater into our basement. We live in a stucco house, which is an effective Faraday cage; I mostly work in the basement under a tile floor with very little direct outside exposure (yes, this explains oh so much). The cell repeater did its job as long as it had even a scant signal to amplify.
About a month ago, our AT&T service simply fell into the toilet. Dropped calls after 10 seconds, no caller ID coming through as calls completed, text messages failing with alarming regularity. My normal 4-5 bars of service in the basement had turned into a single stub, on a good day. Even though bars are more of a binary service indicator, that signal was trending more toward “no service”. A quick check at an AT&T retail store today confirmed what I thought – there’s a signal degradation on the tower that is the target of my home YAGI antenna.
So I bit the bullet and decided to install the AT&T 3G MicroCell. It’s about $150 (there’s a rebate if you sign up for an additional calling plan feature) and it basically bridges a small-area 3G network to your broadband internet connection. Rather than amplifying something that isn’t there (zero times a lot is still zero), it provides an entirely new coverage footprint that backhauls to AT&T’s service network through the piece of fiber Verizon ran to my house. Installation took about half an hour, mostly because I had to put up a new equipment shelf for the router so it could sit arm’s length away away from the wireless router, only to find that locating the router deep in the basement precludes it from finding a GPS signal.
Caveat: If the AT&T 3G MicroCell can’t find a GPS signal, it won’t register. It needs the location information for cellular 911 calls to be send with proper data. There is a jack on the unit to allow you to run a GPS antenna (probably any Sirius/XM Radio type antenna would work) to a more suitable location.
Too early to call this a suitable win, but for ease of installation, and relative benefits, it feels like a good use of time and money.
Actually, you can request a GPS override, which essentially hardcodes the GPS coordinates with AT&T. This override allows the Microcell to register without a GPS lock. I was lucky with mine, it gets a GPS lock even though it is in the basement. GPS technology has come a long way since my first handheld. It lost lock if I was under some trees.
Hal, let us know how this works out. We’ve received a mailing from AT&T offering us a microcell for our house. I’m curious about what the effective range would be, throughout the house and in the backyard. If yours is in the basement, is it effective upstairs? On the back porch?
Thanks to the link about the PCWorld survey. Cool stuff. I’m of the opinion that AT&Ts problems are due to their network being insufficient for the demand. It’ll be interesting to see how that changes if Verizon ever picks up the iPhone (latest rumors are Jan 2011), and if lots of iPhone users jump ship. Will Verizon bog down and AT&T improve? Also wonder if the new data rate plans (with tiers, and I think, no unlimited option) will have an effect.
Update on day two: this thing works, and works well. The problems we had with SMS non-delivery, call drops, and failed AIN/caller ID all disappeared. The voice quality is orders of magnitude (decibels) better than previously. It’s nice to be able to use my cell phone as my primary phone again.