I live in a city of about 130,000 people. My house is located about 2 miles from a major freeway. Neither of these things seem to matter to my cell phones. At home, they struggle to get two or three bars and dropped calls are a frequent occurrence.
I'm not just talking about the notorious A.T.T. here. I'm also talking about Can you hear me now? Verizon. Neither do all that well when it comes to wanting to actually use either of my cell phones in my home. As a result, I've had to also pay for a land line to ensure that I could use the phone at all times.
So, when I saw the announcement of the AT&T 3G Microcell, I was intrigued. It promised a lot of good things - 5 bars pretty much anywhere in 5000 sq feet and the ability to support up to 10 registered phones. Excellent, I thought, I'll give it a shot. The first downside is the price. $149 bucks is a healthy chunk of change to effectively use my home network to get AT&T service in the house. After all, I'm already paying for the network that AT&T leverages to provide coverage which I'm also already paying for.
Nonetheless, I gave it a shot thinking that I might be able to get rid of the cost of my land line. Setup was pretty easy - if you can or have setup a home wireless router or something similar you can set this up no problem. The odd thing is that the device has an embedded GPS chip. Apparently, this is for enhanced 911 services and, presumably, so you're not taking it with you and selling telephone service. The net effect is that you are best off setting it up very near a window - if not, it can take a long time to acquire a signal. The setup took about 30 minutes and I was even able to move it to the center of the house afterward - and it was able to get a lock just fine.
So how does it work? It's been doing pretty darn well. The voice quality does seem very good - though the range is less than advertised. Walk outside and you loose the signal awfully fast. And, as I said, the price of entry is high. I'm hopeful after using this for another few weeks, that I can drop the land line so this thing can start paying for itself.
Hi Aaron, nice blog! I enjoyed reading your post. Thanks, Vanessa!
ReplyDeleteI have an AT&T family plan (3G, data, and text), and that's what I communicate through 90% of the time. Like you, I have also considered canceling my home landline service, but I keep it as an alternate, especially for emergencies.
ReplyDelete3G is spotty in my house, and I experience occasional dropped calls. The AT&T 3G Microcell appears to be a good solution, although quite pricey for the average consumer. For inexpensive domestic calls I use a Netgear cordless Skype phone ($3.99 per month). Skype is surprisingly clear, although it isn't full-duplex, so you have to be careful not to have both parties talk at the same time. I also use the Skype app on the iPhone. That used to only work on wifi, but now that restriction has been removed by AT&T (this week, in fact), so Skype works over 3G now. I hope future services will work seamlessly and ubiquitously from one device. It's hard to keep track anymore!
Look forward to seeing you in class :)