Full Bars Of Reception Inside A Home Regardless of Roof Materials
AT&T 4G LTE is fantastic, high speed internet capable, cellular service if you live in an area populated enough to have it.
Unfortunately, if you live outside of town a little ways, even in a populated subdivision – your reception could be spotty even standing in your front yard; and hilly countryside doesn’t help.
Even if you do have a good signal standing outside your home, you may prefer, for reasons of comfort, privacy and weather, to make your calls inside!
Depending on the construction of your home, though, good cell reception outside may mean very little.
Steel roofing does a fantastic job of blocking wireless communication, which is great for keeping predators off of your home WiFi but bad for your cellphone.
Even without steel roofing, there is an aluminum foil type of thermal shielding used in many of the roofs in places like Texas which also does an equal job of keeping out cell signals as it does the heat.
AT&T 3G MicroCell Is The Answer
AT&T offers their customers a 3G MicroCell which attaches to your broadband to provide full bars of reception inside the average home.
The unit is not inexpensive, though if you contact me through my contact page I’ll tell you how I got mine on the cheap.
Plug it in to power, broadband (there is another jack on the back to “pass thru” broadband to your computer or other device if you are short on router ports) and do the online activation. They tell you it might take 90 minutes but the 2 times we did this it was probably only 30 minutes. You can view the status either on the management website or by viewing the lights on the front of the unit.
The 3G MicroCell does need to access a GPS signal, and they will compare that to the address you enter in the online activation screen. The address does serve for 911 location purposes, so it is needed, and you can enter multiple locations if you travel such as from a Winter home to a Summer home.
They will tell you to put it near a window for that purpose, but with two of them we setup they work in the inner areas of the home even though cell reception doesn’t seem to make it in very well.
In the one home, the problem I had was that I could hear callers perfectly, but their ability to hear me varied as I moved, as I spoke or maybe even as the wind blew.
The AT&T 3G MicroCell fixed the problem perfectly. Now, I can comfortably make calls anywhere inside the home and know that I don’t have to keep repeating myself, stand by a window, or even go outside (which didn’t always help!).
The 3G MicroCell Works Only For Specified AT&T Phones
Need I mention that this works only for AT&T cell service?
More than that, though, you have to give permission to a cell phone to use your 3G MicroCell. Simply add phones by phone number and if they check out as AT&T phones, they then get access to your MicroCell. If you have more than one on your account, you can label them differently so you can tell them apart in the management page of the website.
If you have AT&T cell service and it stinks indoors, check out a AT&T 3G MicroCell from an AT&T store or on Amazon.
Leave a Reply