We’ve talked before about the femtocell. A femtocell is  a small cellular base station which connects to your cell phone service provider’s network via your home’s broadband connection (thus bypassing a weak over the air signal) and broadcasts a strong signal through your home. Very cool for us, since we live in the hills, where the over the air signal is relatively weak regardless of the carrier, but we have an excellent broadband (cable) connection.

A femtocell is specific to a carrier. Not a problem if your family has only one carrier. Due to my gadget addiction, we don’t. We have AT&T (my Dell Streak and my wife’s venerable BlackBerry Bold), Verizon (my Droid Incredible) and Sprint (my HTC Evo 4G).

So, from left to right, the Verizon Wireless Network Extender, the AT&T 3G MicroCell and the newest addition, the Sprint Airave. No T-Mobile … my gadget addiction supporting the economy only goes so far

The femtocells make a big difference, as in full bars vs. one (at best) bar. And they provide coverage throughout our 2 story, 3000+ square foot house.

Of course, this better coverage comes at a price … literally. The carriers sell their femtocells for around $100. Doesn’t seem fair, as the carriers are using your broadband connection to make up for their bad coverage. Seems they should pay you. But they don’t. So it’s either pay them or go without I guess.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 12th, 2010 at 8:48 am and is filed under Mobile Access. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.