Re: Cable Modems

I live in a valley in the hills west of Austin, and normally get 1 - 2 bars of signal strength in my home via the AT&T towers. We had frequent dropped calls when inside the house, and several years ago when I read an article on Broadband Reports (www.broadbandreports.com) about how some AT&T customers were getting free Microcells, I went immediately to the nearest AT&T store and sweet-talked them into giving me a free one.

Now I have 5 bars of signal throughout the house and even in the yard. The only disadvantage is that it is eating up some of my internet bandwidth, but I'll take that hit.

-sjl

"John Jones" wrote in message news:mailman.4465.1375726329.9013.pctech@xxxxxxxxxxxx...

For boosting cell signal under normal conditions (i.e. power & broadband
are available) consider contacting your carrier for a femtocell (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtocell). Basically it's a tiny cell
receiver that covers your home or office area. It uses your broadband to
connect & send voice (and cellular data) traffic to the carrier. Pricing
runs from free to not-expensive depending on carrier and how nicely you can
sweet-talk the CSR into getting you one to make up for lousy coverage.




On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 12:53 PM, Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Thanks for all the comments.

I had a feeling that there were probably repeaters etc. in the line that
could be impacted. We rarely get major outages and when we do (like the
last one) it covered 80% of the city (population about 300,000) so the
chance that the cable would have worked are slim to none anyway I suspect.

Looks like UPS is only worth it for the surge protection (which I already
have) - chances that it would allow on-going connection during any
significant outage are probably slim and the money would be better spent on
another hot-spot - except of course that we are in a virtual black-spot
here ... can't win!

Thanks again to all.



Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com




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