Cellular amplifier/booster device?

[aronesz]

Greetings,

We live out in the rural area where we have virtually no cellular reception / 1 of 5 bars, and I am looking for recommendations to amplifiers/boosters for cellular signals within the $150-400 range. We are not super tech saavy.

 

[teh_chem]

Who is your network provider? AT&T has signal boosters like the MicroCell unit, which interface with your home broadband internet connection and route calls. I believe there is a set-up that you need to do with AT&T to accomplish this properly.

But basically, if your home location only gets weak signals from the towers, than any of the "signal amplifiers" won't do you much good since the incoming signal is already weak with poor coverage (on the other hand, if the problem is your house walls killing the signal, then an amplifier might help).

Depends on your service provider.

 

[aronesz]

AT&T, but we don't have broadband internet because the best internets offered are dialup and satellite.

 

[teh_chem]

Oh, that's unfortunate.

Are you looking to make sure you don't miss voice calls, or are you looking to improve your cell phone data access?

And if you go outside of your house, is the signal strong enough to get calls/data?

 

[aronesz]

If we go outside the house, it is just barely enough to make/take a cell call -- audio quality sucks, very hard to make out what other person is saying much of the time. Still like 1/5 bars. Inside house, it is often that we get "No signal" and "Searching..." altogether -- 0/5 bars.

 

[teh_chem]

If you only care about voice calls to your cell phone, one option (may be more complicated than you're comfortable with) is setting up a Google Voice number--Google Voice has a service where if you have someone call your "google voice" phone number (a number handled by google), it then gets distributed to all of the phone numbers associated with your account, and you can take the call on any of the devices (whether it's your cell phone or your home phone). It's a free service, but I have not set it up myself. People vouch for it. Just one option. Or you can set up call-forwarding through your cell phone provider (might be a monthly fee service, I don't recall off the top of my head if it's available with AT&T, though I bet they'll give you anything that they can charge a monthly fee for).

edit--If you're concerned about cell data coverage, I don't think there's much of an option for you.