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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