The outdoor antenna captures the cellular signal, amplifies it, and rebroadcasts it on an omnidirectional antenna inside the house. A large directional antenna is mounted outside and aimed toward the nearest cell phone tower. The signal booster is actually a pretty simple device. The concept is often vaguely linked with scammy, spammy products (back in the zeroes, a few unscrupulous companies sold bogus stickers for your phone that promised to boost your signal), but modern signal boosters are legit. The good news is that another, potentially better solution exists, though it isn’t cheap: a signal booster that can do a brute-force amplification of your existing cellular signal. It’s great in theory (and great when it’s working), but for me, the only thing less reliable than my cellular service is my Wi-Fi. Femtocells like the $250 Verizon LTE Network Extender are still around to do the job, but AT&T discontinued its MicroCell in 2017 in favor of letting smart phones connect directly to Wi-Fi hot spots.
There’s long been a solution for this, which involves connecting your phone to your home broadband network and doing an end run on the cell tower. Ostensibly that includes my house, but you wouldn’t know it from the quality of service I normally get: invariably one or two bars on my phone, incoming calls that never ring but go straight to voicemail, and the frequent need to stand near a window to get better audio quality and avoid dropping the connection. I’m on the second-biggest carrier, AT&T, which has 68 percent of the country covered. One website recently pegged the US 4G footprint of Verizon at 70 percent. Dropped calls? Slow internet? Texts that go nowhere? Despite all the ads touting breathtaking bandwidth and uninterrupted coverage, the fact is that for many of us, cellular connections remain spotty.
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