I finally got tired of horrible cell service here at the house. Everyone who lives here or visits often is in the habit of walking outside to make phone calls it’s so bad. That and we don’t have a land line. It can be pretty frustrating at times.
So, I decided to purchase a Verizon Wireless Network Extender.
What this will do, for $199 plus tax, is basically set up a mini cell tower in your house. It uses your broadband connection to make the calls and then can support up to 3 mobile phones actively being used at a time. The range is a little weak, roughly a 40ft circle around it, but that is larger than the size of the house. It also requires a GPS signal before it will work, which was a touch worrisome because we’ve had problems getting a good GPS signal here before. You can thank our government for the GPS requirement. All new cell phones are Required to send a GPS location when making 911 calls, so the mini tower is also Required to know where it is also. It’s a pain in the ass, but it finally grabbed a signal and is now seems to be working fine.
I’ve had it up and running for a few hours now and it seems to work fairly decently. In fact my work phone, a Sprint Blackberry, now has 4 bars when before it had 1 to none. I have noticed that my Sprint phone will lose the local mini tower but then reacquired it. Strange, but at least now I can make calls with it without going out into the street. That and our Verizon phones are working just fine.
So far so good.
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July 9, 2010 at 3:10 PM
Dad
Now I need you to help me figure how to change a garage door opener’s range (our park gate remote) from 30′ to about 100′ without frying the circuit????
Any ideas? I have read extending the antenna is the first step.
Have you heard of any “add-ons” I could buy?
July 9, 2010 at 4:06 PM
Kate
Ah, phones. Rob has started fetching podcasts of something called TWIT (This week in tech) and all they talk about is smart phones. I’ve still got a dumb phone.
July 11, 2010 at 12:25 PM
icehawk55
I haven’t heard of anything to extend a garage door type transmitter.
I have a blackberry phone for work. Which is pretty dumb considering how crippled it’s been made via “security”. I get emails and phone calls. Which isn’t too bad I suppose.