Cell phone boosters

[Fred Belknap]

Anyone have any experience with cell phone boosters. At my house there isn't enough signal to register on a cell phone. I can go up on a hill, 1200 to 1500'elevation difference I can get enough to make a call. I'm wondering if I could get some signal in my house with a booster. I'm looking at a Wilson model. Any ideas or suggestions.

[Matt Meiser]

If you can't get a signal outside a booster isn't going to help you inside. Unless you can put the antenna on a 1500' tower :D

Who is your carrier? What do you have for broadband? Many carriers have boxes that attach to your broadband connection and act as a mini-cell tower. The technical name for the box is a femtocell, but I've seen them advertised under various marketing names. My parents have a Sprint Airrave which works great for them other than needing a reboot every few months.

[Jerry Thompson]

I had Clearwire for the Internet. I could see the tower out of my window but it would hardly work. They did not become excited about my protests until I quit them. I have a cell phone with the same problem and the same tower. I have to go outside to use it. Others have the same problem in my house although they are on a different service than me. Go figure.

[Jim Tobias]

I recently got the booster from Verizon that attaches to your modem. It is made by Samsung. I bought it through Verizon but called and complained(honest complaint) that the $G service was not getting through all the tall trees around my house. They cut the cost in half on the booster. It works great. I went from 2 bars at most to a 4-5 bars all over the house. BIG improvement for me.

Jim

[Jim Becker]

If you can't get a signal outside a booster isn't going to help you inside. Unless you can put the antenna on a 1500' tower :D

Who is your carrier? What do you have for broadband? Many carriers have boxes that attach to your broadband connection and act as a mini-cell tower. The technical name for the box is a femtocell, but I've seen them advertised under various marketing names. My parents have a Sprint Airrave which works great for them other than needing a reboot every few months.

I agree with Matt. I'm an ATT customer and have a MicroCell (their version of a FemtoCell) in my home. The primary difference with this device over a "booster" is that while our 3G phones are talking to the MicroCell, the calls are being routed in and out via our Internet connection. (Which happens to be Verizon FiOS in our case) Our home happens to sit in the lee of the hill that the tower is actually on, but the hill blocks line-of-sight. Therefore no carrier's phone works well or often at all in our home. The MicroCell fixed that for us. It will hand off to the cell tower if we leave the property and 80% of the time we don't drop until we get just round the bend in the road to where there is a 5-bar signal from the tower. The downside is that the cell network cannot hand-off to the MicroCell when we come home and are on a call. Nature of the beast...

But it was absolutely worth the $150 I paid for the device as we can now use our phones at home.

[Matt Meiser]

Cost: My parents got theirs free by calling Sprint and threatening to go to Verizon which does work at their house. Sprint gave them the hardware and waives the monthly fee. When the Sprint coverage at our house went bad due to tower issues that were taking months to resolve, they offered me one but our internet connection isn't good enough to support it.

[Fred Belknap]

Thanks everyone. I'm still not sure it will help me. One thing even though I can't get cell service in or around my house vehicles with a booster installed can make calls from my driveway. The one I'm looking at cost over $400, but I'm not sure it will work. My wife thinks she needs it.:confused:

[Eric Franklin]

What I have from a guy that sells and services cell phone boosters and phone systems that if you don't have at least 3 bars of service where you would put the outside antenna, they don't work to well. From what I've heard, they usually run $500-600 for a booster.

[Jason Steward]

I have a Z Boost, I bought for about $300 I think from amazon. I mounted a DIRECTIONAL antenna aimed at the tower and went from 1-2 bars to 4-5 bars. In fact there is better reception inside my house than outside. The only tricky part is separating the inside unit from the outside unit sufficiently to keep them from interfering with each other. In my case its not a problem since my house is concrete covered with dirt and grass.

[Jim Tobias]

Fred,
Below is the one I mentioned in the earlier post.
http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/accessory?action=gotoFemtocell

Jim