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E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
My New Femtocell: Can You Hear Me Now?
Because I absolutely hate the fact that my house is a cell phone dead zone, I bought a new gadget that you've probably never heard of. It's called a femtocell and it hit the U.S. market in 2008.
The technology is designed to boost reception in homes and businesses and uses a box that looks like a Wi-Fi router to do that. It's like having a mini-cell tower in your home, because the box uses your broadband network and a GPS connection instead of the nearest cell phone tower.
The base station plugs into your broadband or DSL connection with an Ethernet cable and into your power outlet. And presto! That's it.
I decided to jump on this technology while it was still fairly new, before my mobile carrier (Verizon) gets slick and decides to charge a monthly fee for the service (like Sprint and T-Mobile).
I thought it was going to be some fancy set-up that would involve me watching an online tutorial, studying the manual for several hours and then asking my tech-savvy compadres how to work the darn thing. But that wasn't the case at all. I didn't even read the manual.
I placed the femtocell near my window (for the GPS signal) and on a table (I read the quick-start guide, at least.). After about an hour, my “network extender” was working. I went from no bars to four bars and have been chatting away ever since.
Don't hate.
I have been using the femtocell for all of two days, so I will let you know if it slows down my Internet connection or drops my calls unexpectedly. But so far, so good.
The technology is growing rapidly, and the Femto Forum (I promise I'm not making this up.) is developing femtocell standards as I type.
And if you're wondering why you've never heard of it, it's because mobile carriers have not promoted their femtocell rollouts. One theory is that the carriers are waiting until we're no longer in a recession and until they get their femto-testing out of the way. (Okay. I made up "femto-testing.") Another theory is that the carriers—who are all about their nationwide coverage and vast networks—don't want to call attention to the fact that they are selling a device to counteract their dreaded dead zones that we all know exist.
Can you hear me now?