Just about exactly a month ago, I went out and purchased an AT&T Microcell. AT&T reception in our house is awful, and I’m not in a position to switch to Verizon. Therefore, the Microcell seemed like a good choice.
If you’re familiar with the Microcell concept, it’s a small device that uses your internet connection and essentially creates a cell tower in your house. I set it up in our office and now we have full 3G bars through the entire house! My wife and I both have iPhones, and friends have used various other 3G phones. They all work very well with the Microcell. You can read more about it on AT&T’s site.
Cost: $149 to buy the unit. If you want, you can sign a contract for $14.95 month for an individual ($29.99 for a family plan) and minutes you use via the Microcell don’t count toward your monthly minute caps. It’s a neat idea, but we’re always under our minutes anyhow so we didn’t do it. $149 and we were out the door.
Installation: Simple, but buggy. It’s not hard to set up, but you need to wait 90 minutes for it “configure itself”. After a few hours it was still failing so I had to call AT&T. There’s a GPS inside the Microcell so they can make sure you only use it from your house. Somehow the coordinates they thought I should have didn’t match with the Microcell, so it would never connect. Once they fixed it over the phone it worked great.
Adding Users: For a person to be able to use it, you need to add their number to the system. It’s easy to add one, but you’re limited to 10. I’d like to just add all of my AT&T friends and be done with it, so when they come over they’ll get full bars. Sadly, I need to swap them out from time to time. Seems pretty silly to have to do that. The idea behind this is to prevent your neighbors from leeching your signal, which makes sense. Still, why a limit of just 10? Also, it’s worth mentioning that only four calls can be made simultaneously on the device. I doubt that’ll ever be a problem for us.
Issues: AT&T brags about a seamless hand-off if you leave your house mid-call. It’ll transfer your call from the Microcell to the nearest tower without a hiccup. That may be true, but our data connection gets messed up whenever we leave the house. It’s a few minutes (or a reboot) before data will work again. Kind of a pain.
Bottom Line: If you have AT&T cell phones in your house and have bad reception, get a Microcell! It’s a shame that you need one, but it does the job. As a friend said: “You need to switch to Verizon. I don’t need anything special from them to get cell reception in my house.” It’s true. I hate that I had to pay AT&T $150 to fix their pathetic network, but now I get great reception with my phone and I’m happy I did it.
I too have the Microcell and I have had trouble with it. It continually needs to be unplugged to reset. I am not satisfied with the data service. It just does not work well. Yes when it works I can make calls but it can not be relied on as I do SKYPE service. Only 5 months left on my ATT sentence after which I will try and sell it on ebay and switch to Verizon.
It is hard to believe that my son can use his 3G Verizon service in my house and I have to use the expensive work around microcell with AT&T…
Ron
Mickey,
thank you for your blog and information shared. I am wondering where you are located…here in Sac, CA, it does not seem to be yet available.
thanks
Tom
Tom – I’m in the Atlanta area. It came out just a few days before I got it, so it’s been available for about six weeks now.
I’m not sure what their schedule is to roll it out to the rest of the country, though I’m not sure why it matters to them. It just uses your internet connection, so it should (theoretically) be available nationwide.
From my experience they do not have enough network geeks to support the customer service in getting all the units to work at once. If everything works right it may take them less than two hours. If there are problems it can take days to get each unit working.
when it works it works great with 3g signal at home.