 | | More jobs down the drain The repeater industry is a fairly big business. I thought government was supposed to help create jobs, not kill them. | |
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 |  BF69Premium
join:2004-07-28
Camden, TN | Re: More jobs down the drain Seriously is everything always about something? I pity you. I really do if you believe the way you do. | |
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 pnh102Reptiles Are Cuddly And PrettyPremium
join:2002-05-02
Mount Airy, MD |  Buy One Now If You Need It
This smells a lot like the CAN-SPAM act... it ended up legalizing most spam. Given how sympathetic the FCC is towards the concerns of cell phone carriers, my guess is that FCC guidelines are going to make it as inconvenient as possible to own one of these devices.
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Romney 2012 - Put an adult in charge. | |
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| Reviews:
 ·Charter
| Re: Buy One Now If You Need It said by pnh102:The title of this article should read "Need a Signal Booster? Buy one NOW Before the FCC Regulates them to Death"
This smells a lot like the CAN-SPAM act... it ended up legalizing most spam. Given how sympathetic the FCC is towards the concerns of cell phone carriers, my guess is that FCC guidelines are going to make it as inconvenient as possible to own one of these devices.
and people will continue to buy the poorly made ones from china that do interfere with the cell phones of others because the cell companies will deny you the use of one at all costs except if it benefits them. | |
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| | pnh102Reptiles Are Cuddly And PrettyPremium
join:2002-05-02
Mount Airy, MD | Re: Buy One Now If You Need It said by Chubbysumo:and people will continue to buy the poorly made ones from china that do interfere with the cell phones of others because the cell companies will deny you the use of one at all costs except if it benefits them. To me, this just seems like a problem that cell phone companies can solve on their own simply by putting up more antennas on their own. Newer antennas are far less obtrusive than older ones.
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Romney 2012 - Put an adult in charge. | |
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| | |  ArrayListnetbus developerPremium
join:2005-03-19
Evanston, IL | Re: Buy One Now If You Need It isn't the idea to do as little as possible and make as much money as possible? | |
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| | | | | said by pnh102:To me, this just seems like a problem that cell phone companies can solve on their own simply by putting up more antennas on their own. Newer antennas are far less obtrusive than older ones.
But why spend money on new towers that would solve a long term solution when you can grease some palms in the short term and make more money in the long run by being the only source of repeaters for your customers? Why let your customers source one from Amazon for ~$200 when you can kill the competition and sell your [insert company name] branded one at 3 times the markup?
Oh, and I like your signature 
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"My weakness is that I care too much" | |
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| | | | pnh102Reptiles Are Cuddly And PrettyPremium
join:2002-05-02
Mount Airy, MD | Re: Buy One Now If You Need It Point.
I wouldn't mind the use of in-home boosters provided by the cell phone carrier, but these should be provided at no extra charge to the customer, as it compensating for a defect in the service.
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Romney 2012 - Put an adult in charge. | |
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| | | | | Reviews:
 ·Callcentric
·Charter
| Re: Buy One Now If You Need It Perhaps they could offer them for free if it's left open for anyone to use, or a nominal charge if it's locked down for use only by the owner. I would be interested in how many femtocells the carriers could give away vs. the cost of permitting, constructing and maintaining 1 cell site.
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Follow me on Twitter: @MyTechLife2 | |
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| | | | | | pnh102Reptiles Are Cuddly And PrettyPremium
join:2002-05-02
Mount Airy, MD | Re: Buy One Now If You Need It said by MyTechLife:Perhaps they could offer them for free if it's left open for anyone to use, or a nominal charge if it's locked down for use only by the owner. I would be interested in how many femtocells the carriers could give away vs. the cost of permitting, constructing and maintaining 1 cell site. It should definitely not be free for anyone to use, as it is using a broadband subscriber's potentially capped bandwidth.
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Romney 2012 - Put an adult in charge. | |
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| | | | |  aaronwtPremium
join:2004-11-07
Woodbridge, VA
 ·Verizon FiOS
| said by pnh102:Point.
I wouldn't mind the use of in-home boosters provided by the cell phone carrier, but these should be provided at no extra charge to the customer, as it compensating for a defect in the service.
Most carriers will provide one free of charge. As long as you show you get a crappy signal from them in your home, they will typically provide one for free.
But if you have a halfway decent signal, no one should be expecting the carrier to provide it for free, since it's not really needed. | |
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| | | | | | scooper
join:2000-07-11
Youngsville, NC
kudos:2 | Re: Buy One Now If You Need It reallY ? Free ? to Any customer ?
Dream on ! I could really use one at my house (I only get Edge network from AT&T). and they DO NOT even offer them at any price for those of us that use only GoPhones ! | |
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| | | | | | | aaronwtPremium
join:2004-11-07
Woodbridge, VA Reviews:
·Verizon FiOS
| Re: Buy One Now If You Need It said by scooper:reallY ? Free ? to Any customer ?
Dream on ! I could really use one at my house (I only get Edge network from AT&T). and they DO NOT even offer them at any price for those of us that use only GoPhones !
It sounds like if you get Edge network you are fine. You can make and receive calls. The carriers that will give you a free Femtocell won't do it if you get a signal. It's not about speed but the signal. If you basically have no signal, that is when you can get the Femtocell. But one or two bars is a decent enough signal. | |
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| | | | | Sammer
join:2005-12-22
Canonsburg, PA
1 edit | said by pnh102:Point.
I wouldn't mind the use of in-home boosters provided by the cell phone carrier, but these should be provided at no extra charge to the customer, as it compensating for a defect in the service.
The carriers don't want to admit that there are defects in their networks that could be easily solved (at a cost to the carrier) by the use of micro-cells and femtocells. If they really cared about service rather than just the almighty dollar they would be doing more to improve service now. As stated by the previous poster if you complain loud enough ("squeaky wheel gets the grease") they may try to resolve the problem for no charge. | |
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| | | | | | | | Re: Buy One Now If You Need It Without a doubt. I've contacted Verizion about their shortcomings in my community. Provided everything possible to show that we're essentially in a deadzone. I was just offered a femtocell as a fix, at my costs. I would have gone ahead and said sure, but we dont even have broadband capable of providing the correct boost. AWESOME. | |
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| | Blame it on the digital disease Its just the digital disease, to control everything in this country. | |
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Reviews:
 ·Frontier Communi..
| licensed freqencies What part of the above is so hard to understand?
The carriers paid billions of dollars for the right to EXCLUSIVELY broadcast transmissions in the cellular/PCS/AWS/etc bands. Stop acting as though it's some sort of conspiracy because they want the ability to control which devices broadcast on these frequencies, where they are located, and how much power they transmit.
Femtocells are available to fix coverage gaps. Of course people around here bitch about those too, with absolutely no technical understanding of what is required to ensure femtocells don't interfere with users of the macro cellular network. I've even seen people bitching about the fact that they can't easily change the antenna configurations or tweak the transmit levels of their femtocell. Apparently they equate them to wi-fi access points and desire the same amount of control over them, forgetting that wi-fi has only limited ability to deprive your neighbor of service and that it operates on unlicensed frequencies.
Invest in a landline or femtocell if the service sucks that badly where you live. Break your contract if you must, Verizon and T-Mobile both have "get out of jail free" cards in their contract if you move somewhere that has no coverage. I presume AT&T and Sprint do as well, though I've never done business with them directly and can't confirm. | |
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| | | Re: licensed freqencies Investing in a landline doesnt help with my cell not working?
Femtocell's require broadband capable of a sustained connection. If verizion had any intention of deploying high speed here, it would be an instant sell to 200 of the 300 homes. Instead, we're stuck with a copper infrastructure that is 40 years old. Believe me, I know where I live and how we're not going to see an antenna placed closer to us. But, its frustrating that I can 3 bars of 4G just 200 yards or so away, and if i want a booster, they're taking that option away | |
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| | Reviews:
·Frontier Communi..
| Re: licensed freqencies said by jeepwrang3:Investing in a landline doesnt help with my cell not working? It gets you working telecommunications, isn't that the whole point? Working landline > cell phone with no signal.
said by jeepwrang3:and if i want a booster, they're taking that option away
With limited exceptions, you've never had the right to broadcast radio waves on a licensed frequency where you are not the licensee. I understand your frustrations here and it truly sucks but if you're being fair can you not understand why they don't want third parties putting up transmitters that broadcast on their licensed spectrum? Transmitters that they have no control over and limited recourse against if they interfere with other customers?
Besides, you DO have other options. Voice communications are easily provided for with a POTS line. If you have 4G service 200 yards away it would be just as easy to get it back to your house with wi-fi as it is to invest in a cellular repeater that may or may not be legal. | |
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| | | | | Re: licensed freqencies I certainly understand the part about not wanting third parties developing without standards set. Thats why Wilson to my understanding started working immediately with the FCC.
As far as a wifi setup, I've certainly looked into it as my current source of internet is a deliberant system of hops from a buddy's T1. Climbing 3 roofs rather than one is the reason why i've passed on that thus far.
I know you keep saying POTS line, i could care less about one. If it was cheap thats one thing. The fact that after taxes it was roughly 50 bucks a month, just to have my # sold to various groups, I decided to pass on it in the new house. | |
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| | | | Reviews:
·Frontier Communi..
| Re: licensed freqencies said by jeepwrang3:I know you keep saying POTS line, i could care less about one. If it was cheap thats one thing. The fact that after taxes it was roughly 50 bucks a month, just to have my # sold to various groups, I decided to pass on it in the new house.
My Frontier POTS line is $26/mo and change. My old Verizon one was around $30/mo as I recall. Not sure where you live but I find $50/mo hard to fathom, unless you're including additional services or some sort of package deal that's allegedly going to save you money (they rarely do).
As far as selling your number, the only reason wireless companies aren't doing that is because they are prohibited by law from doing so. That prohibition stems from the fact that incoming wireless calls cost you money. This is slowly ceasing to be the case as unlimited calling plans become the norm rather than the exception and I wouldn't be surprised if we see this legal prohibition removed in the not-so-distant future. | |
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| mworks
join:2006-06-13
Faison, NC | said by Crookshanks:What part of the above is so hard to understand?
The carriers paid billions of dollars for the right to EXCLUSIVELY broadcast transmissions in the cellular/PCS/AWS/etc bands. Stop acting as though it's some sort of conspiracy because they want the ability to control which devices broadcast on these frequencies, where they are located, and how much power they transmit.
They didn't pay billions. Verizon formed a shell company that was sold spectrum at a discount as small business and then after winning the bid closed out the company. These are the type of tactics telecom has used for years. They will do whatever they can to push the laws as far into their favor as possible. They want signal boosters for one reason only, less cost for them . If they can increase transmit power at the phone end then they win in a big way. | |
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contsolePremium
join:2003-12-30
Bloomfield, CT | Which Ones? Is this the about the pico cell sites (like Samsung makes for Verizon) or Wilson Electronic repeaters for home and car or the $20,000 systems that Tessco sell for office buildings? | |
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| | Thing unusual here. Devices that radiate RF are under the FCC's jurisdiction. Devices such Wifi, cordless phones, garage door openers are all regulated by the FCC as well. Why should signal boosters be any different? Unlike part 15 devices a cell phone booster is operating on a very important piece of radio spectrum. A malfunctioning booster will create interference and drive down data rates for everyone else in that particular sector of the cell.
An interesting piece of history... Motorola with the early MicroTAC/TeleTAC series of analog phones used to have a handsfree kit that would clone the ESN of the portable phone into a 5w transceiver installed in the car which became the actual phone. New standards to prevent cell phone cloning were enacted so motorola had to completely re engineer their handsfree kit. They pretty much created a in car cell phone booster except the handset had to be plugged into a rather bulky cradle to couple the signal between the booster and the phone.
When the digital CDMA phones arrived on the market motorola dropped the booster and simply provided connectors on the phone to hook to an external antenna. When Motorola switched from focusing on selling phones to the business sector to the consumer sector, they completely dropped the notion of selling a car kit for their phones. | |
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| mworks
join:2006-06-13
Faison, NC | Re: Without a booster, I could not use my cell phones at home said by NetFixer:Without this device (which does have built-in protection against interfering with AT&T's network according to the manufacturer *):
You are the kind of customer this technology is designed for. The problem is that if it becomes the common thing to do for everyone then you will have people that install it just because they only get 3 out of 4 bars.
It becomes very difficult to control signals like this when you have lots of these devices in a small area. We are doing trials in wilmington, nc for white space wireless that uses the frequencies that are not used for existing tv channels . The problem with these frequencies is they go very far , through trees, walls, whatever and that is a problem with wireless consumer devices. Think wifi channel congestion is a problem in apartments now ? Try using wireless when every home has a signal that can reach down the block easily. | |
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scooper
join:2000-07-11
Youngsville, NC
kudos:2 Reviews:
·Time Warner Cable
·Embarq Now Centu..
| I assume you all have broadband internet .. So why not go VoIP ?
I have two lines available (1 incoming number) and I spend less than $10 most months after I invested in a $60 ATA (Linksys PAP2T).
That said - yes I would like better cell phone at my house - voice is difficult at best (even outside) and data would be unusable.... | |
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| | | Re: I assume you all have broadband internet .. said by scooper:So why not go VoIP ? Personally, I hate the delay with VoIP. | |
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| | scooper
join:2000-07-11
Youngsville, NC
kudos:2 | Re: I assume you all have broadband internet .. What delay ?
You would not be able to tell if I was on POTS or VoIP if I didn't tell you... | |
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| | What does this mean for current users of signal boosters? So, for current users of these signal boosters, what will be the impact / implications? Will they still be able to use them? Or is it still unknown until the final FCC ruling / language is released? | |
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