cell phone booster
 

I have really bad service, both Verizon and Sprint on my cell phone. Does any one have a cell phone booster? I am looking for a wireless one? Don't know too much about them, but not looking for a whole lot of wires running up the house out the roof??

I had bad service at my home and and was in a small dead spot. I called AT&T and after a little "persuasion" shall we say, I got a free booster from them that works like a charm. No extra cost whatsoever. Most cell providers will give you one of these if you complain enough.

Another option is if you have wifi internet service in your home now and you are using a smart phone, use "wifi calling" on your phone while home if you have that option, works great!

Dan

Network Extender
 

I guess I wasn't as persuasive or lucky as Dan or Verizon just won't budge. I have poor cell service with verizon and ended up getting a network extender that I purchased fromy verizon. You have to plug it into your router for it to work. It works like a mini cell tower in your home. I have people stop in front of my house to use their cell phones and my house is not close to the street. So basically I paid for the extender to plug into my Internet to make Verizon service better in my immediate area. I am happy to have my cell phone work at home though.

Wifi calling as mentioned by ishoot308 basically does the same thing as the extender. We had the same situation with Verizon and had purchased the extender, used with iPhone 5s. After we replaced those in December I set the phones to enable wifi calling. The extender has been unplugged ever since.

Before they put the new Verizon tower on the east side of Alton Bay, above the Echo Point area, our cell coverage at our house was poor.
I borrowed a friend's Verizon range extender. The paperwork says coverage is about 5,000 sq ft. That sounded like the answer to our prayers. Until I started using it.
That 5,000 sq ft sounded like a lot until I realized we are talking about a circle that is centered on the extender's antenna. What that works out to is a 40 ft radius. I was losing coverage over by our garage or out near the street. For us, it wasn't worth buying our own.
Fortunately, the new antenna had made it a moot point.

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So I would plug the extender into my Metrocast router? Even my metriocast stinks too. How much is this thing? A couple hundred I assume.

I believe it was either $225 or $250 when I was looking at it. Yes, plug it into the router. Good news is even with"stinky" Metrocast, it does work (don't think it uses much bandwidth). ☺

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I have one of the first generation 1x extenders. It helped me a lot at home. Since then, they have 3G and now 4G extenders.

But recently I turned on WiFi calling on my phones.

WiFi calling seems to work ok, but often it seems to take a moment or two to fully connect a call. We often spend a few seconds saying "hello, hello" before the other party can hear us. I'm not sure why yet. I'm begining to think it may be the combination of the 1x network extender and WiFi calling. I'm not sure if it's only WiFi calling alone.

A lot of people are not aware of the WiFi calling feature, nor how to enable it on your phones. Give it a try if you have very poor to no cell service.

I installed a Wilson DT booster a year ago and gained at least one bar at all times. I do still lose a call now and then, but nowhere near as often as I used to.
The DT does however require mounting an external antenna and connection to your modem. I mounted it to a 3 foot pole attached to the septic vent on my roof and ran the lead into the house right alongside the vent pipe. The antennae was aimed directly at my strongest cell tower using a free phone app called "OpenSignal". Not quite as easy as full wireless, but it was relatively inexpensive, easy to install, and most importantly... it works!

I have the Verizon booster that ties into my router...I have literally, no signal but with the booster I have a solid 5 bars in the radius around the house...I had heard after I spent the $250 on it that if you whined hard enough, Verizon would give you a free one...however the money spent was worth having cell service at my house.

You are correct! I whined enough and got mine free. They started at $250, then the more I protested the lower the price got, until they gave it to me.

I use it at a different house that Verizon admits is mid-way between two towers and acknowledges that I have poor service at that location. I had to threaten to drop them and repeatedly mentioned that my next door neighbor has At&T and they gave him an extender with no argument. It took 5 phone calls but it became more about winning than spending the money.

I get it, the squeaky wheel principle ;0

The "squeaky wheel" principle has worked for me in battling the insidious increase in cable rates.

A couple times I've called the cable co. (Comcast, out west) and whined, threatening to switch providers, and each time they lowered the rate to keep me happy.

I've got the Mcell with AT&T. You need a wifi connection and this device just plugs into your router to create its own cell network. Works great. I did have to pay for it.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Wi-Fi Calling
 

My latest smartphone has the Wi-Fi calling feature. I turned it on and works great as long as there is a Wireless connection.

WOW,

I would be more interested in finding out how to make a WIFI connection when there was no WIFI available :)

I ran an AT&T Micro Cell for several years at my home until new towers went up. AT&T gave it to you for free if the service at your home was poor. You had to specify what phones were allowed to access it. No one else could use it.

I use a WeBoost in the car. Made by Wilson. The one in the car works quite well.

There is a "home" version as well. It is a real call phone repeater.

You will need an outside antenna, but that will also provide the best performance. There is an inside antenna as well. The inside antenna and the outside antenna must be physically separated from each other by quite a bit or feedback will result, however the documentation explains everything very nicely.

Interesting. I don't believe there is a way make it so the Verizon network extender will only work with certain phones or numbers. I guess Verizon is happy to have the customer increase the coverage area.

On the Verizon extender there are some settings for it (via your Verizon management page) that allow it to be completely 'open', or to give certain cell phone numbers 'priority'. Enter your family cell phone numbers, then set it to give those phones priority access.

By giving those in your home priority, you ensure that they can always use it, as most of these devices are limited to a certain number of phones using it at one time.

I need to put a vote in for Google Project Fi. I got one of their phones about 8 months ago (Nexus 5x) and couldn't be happier. [Well, that's a lie, I can always find something to make me happier.] Their service for unlimited talk/text is $20/month, no contract. Data charges are $10 / gigabyte, if used. The big feature is that the phone automatically uses WiFi whenever it can find it. Call quality is excellent. I keep the "data" service turned off unless I really need it (and away from WiFi). So far, my total data charge for over 8 months has been under $3.

BroadHopper. We have ok cell coverage at our house now with one problem. Our house started off as a 40x8 trailer with a 22x8 porch. Mom and dad did some expanding, all around and up. Now a 10 room house with the trailer still in the middle. Cell coverage drops way off in the middle out the house due to the metal skin of the trailer, resulting in dropped calls when we go in that area. Our wireless router is in that area, and we do use WiFi on our phones.
I can see how WiFi calling will help at the house. Questions: Do you leave that option on all the time, both home and away. If you do leave it on all the time does it try to connect with other WiFi networks? Is that a problem?
Thanks

Sent from my SM-G930V using Winnipesaukee Forum mobile app

Google Project Fi
 

I have had Verizon for about 15 years. The past few days, in places in Gilford where I usually have 4 bars, I have dropped several calls. I thought it was either the weather or a tower problem with Verizon. I called Verizon and they deny any issues on their end and claim they have not heard from anyone else regarding this.

After paying them about $70 a month for many years the Google phone is very interesting. I think it would help at the other house where I currently have a range extender and even with some internet use it will still be about 1/2 the amount that I am paying Verizon now and result in better service.

I am reluctant to make the change given the old adage "If it sounds too good to be true it probably is". I would like to hear the experience of anyone else with the Google phone if you care to post it. Thank you.

Google Project Fi
 

To expand a bit on my previous post... My first cell phone was an Ameritech bag phone. Five watts and I could call back to camp from the top of Mt Major. Next came a Sprint phone. The first attempt found no signal at all on Smiths Point (despite their coverage assurances). A replacement Sprint phone could get an occasional signal and would roam onto the Verizon network.

[I remember being at the authorized Sprint dealer, Radio Shack in the Belmont Mall, and watching them trying to activate a new phone. They had to go out to the parking lot to get any signal. The guy still bought it.]

Since I could only get a Verizon signal, I decided to switch to Verizon service about 12 years ago. Although the signal on Smiths Point was weak, I could still talk if I went to the top of the driveway and stood on the leach field.

Note that I had a flip phone, while my daughter had an Android smart phone. [She couldn't get a signal either.] Anyway, I thought that the price I was paying for basic, limited calling was pretty extravagant.

My daughter (now with a mechanical engineering degree) dumped her Verizon phone and got a Google phone. She was (and is) so happy with it that she convinced the rest of the family that lots more features for substantially less money was a good idea. We all opted for the Nexus 5X. [They have more options available now.] It is truly unlimited talk/text.

Calls automatically route over WiFi, if available (although you can force a cell connection). Call quality is excellent. Here in Columbus, if you use a particular cable system for Internet, they permit you free use of a large number of hot-spots around the area. This might be true in the Lakes Region. Regardless, many establishments provide hot-spots for their customers' use. The phone remembers the networks as you use them.

Sadly, I have not been able to get to the Lake since I got the Google phone so I can't attest to how well it will work on the available cell networks there. However, it will work on any WiFi network.

As an Android phone, there is no Apple or Microsoft nonsense to contend with. One of my favorite uses for the phone [Oddly making phone calls has become a secondary use.] is the free Kindle app. No matter where I have to wait on something, I always have my latest book in my pocket. "Older" books from my youth (I'm 68) are frequently available in multi-volume sets for $0.99. Now, if I can only find a good source of cheap butter, my life will be completely in order.

Crusty,

Thanks for your valuable information. One question I have is that their web site gives me the indication that the WIFI has to be un-encrypted, is this really true? I don't mind running a limited power open network at my house, but it seems like a big limitation in the outside world as there are very few open networks available anymore.

Thanks.

wifi,

The WiFi at my home is protected via WPA2. The phone asked me for the access key the first time I tried to use it and again whenever I change it. Otherwise it remembers. I have also entered the access keys of several relatives' and friends' WiFi routers. as well as the name of an unprotected network at one friend's home (I've urged him to add a password).

The caveat on their website may refer to connecting to public hot-spots. The phone can't connect to a protected one unless you know the password. Also, a lot of public hot-spots will run without a password, but require you to click an acknowledgement that you won't do anything illegal, nor sue them.

They have added a lot of detail to their website since I signed up. I plan to spend some time there out of curiosity. There are a lot of neat things about this phone I haven't discovered yet.

Hope this is useful,
Crusty

That makes a lot more sense, basically, I can cover myself at home and work and many other places I have the security key.

One other question, if you buy some gig(s) of data and add a second phone to the account, is the data shared, or is it per phone ?

They didn't have a group plan when I signed up. Investigating, I find that I can consolidate the family's phones into a single account with a shared data pool. They also knock off $5 / month for the 2nd through 6th phone.

Except for billing convenience (and the $5 discount), there's not much advantage. You establish your "data budget" (say 3 gigabytes) and prepay for that amount. At the end of the month, they either bill you for any excess you use (@ $10 / gigabyte) or refund any amount you didn't use. Whether individual plans or a group plan, it's a wash; You pay for the amount of data used.

One nice feature of the group plan though, as the "owner" you can restrict usage by the sub-accounts.

Yes, I leave it on all the time. Saves on gigabytes used, as you use the wifi instead of 4G/3G. The phone will ask me if I want to connect to a network if it does not recognize the SSID. The phone builds a list of previous SSIDs connected, sort of like a 'trusted' list. So there is no concern about connecting to a network without permission.

Update
 

Thanks everyone for the tips! I bought a network extender off of craigslist for Verizon, for 70 bucks and I hooked it up this weekend and bam! 4 bars, thing works great. I also had Metrocast installed (internet only) bought a roku express stick and that will be what we are using for TV. I suggest both of these.