AT&T's 3G MicroCell gets unboxed, looks sufficiently cute
By Darren Murph 
posted September 21st 2009 6:03PM
posted September 21st 2009 6:03PM
[Thanks, Aaron]
posted September 21st 2009 6:03PM
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This will be great for my mom to ditch her over priced land line that is from a monopolized small town phone company that won't allow Qwest or Comcast to provide phone service in her area and charges long distance to call the next town over. All cell carriers' coverage stops about 2 miles short of her house except ATT which has about 2 bars of EDGE in the yard and 1 bar in some windows of the house off and on. Basically just enough to push through SMS and standard voicemail notifications (not visual vmail on my iphone though). Now the only sticking point is what to do when the electricity goes out, she wouldn't have cell coverage and would have to rely on the land line still.
You get her lifeline service, e.g. just for emergencies, at the lowest possible cost. Make sure you have a simple phone that doesn't require a power brick and can operate off the power on the phone line alone. Even one of these in the house might be enough. I would never want to depend on 9-1-1 over cellphone coverage in an emergency. But she can probably get lifeline service for like $4 or $5 per month as a just-in-case backup.
"here's an idea, instead of adding more service capacity, we'll sell a product that only works in your house"
My house is the only place my phone doesn't work ...
I want/need one of these ASAP... ZERO service in my totally obscure Pac Heights San Francisco apartment!!
Cingular, raising the bar
FYI - my friend picked up one of these today. Being the geek that he is, he cracked it open to see what its 'innards' look like. A bunch of jumpers are clipped to the case, and come loose if you open it. Now, it no longer works. So, don't open it up if you actually want to use the thing.
Too funny, there goes $150.00
This is pretty much wifi router that charges 20 dollars extra. Seriously? Gizmodo did an article on why this POS should be FREE and suckers can't get around their no bar BS.
ATT and Apple pretty much have everyone on a leash, and this is their dog tag on you.
This has nothing to do with WIFI.
Ugh. I pay AT&T around $300/mo for wireless, internet and home phone service. You're ****ing telling me I have to pay $150 for this because they can't provide me decent cell service at my house. This is so frustrating.
Give it to me free if I'm already spending $3600/year with you.
So let me get this straight. I buy a $200 iPhone form AT&T (mine was actually $399 when I got it) and give them somewhere around $80 a month for service for two years. Turns out their coverage sucks and/or their system is simply overloaded. Now they want to sell me a $200 box with an additional monthly service charge that magically gives me a phone signal at my house at the expense of my on broadband that I'm paying out the nose for?
How does this not scream scam to everyone with half a brain?
Does this device not prove that they are not able to provide the service they are due to provide upon entering a contract with us consumers?
Didn't Sprint do this like 3 years ago? And yeah, it should be free if they can verify it's a dead spot. Way to go AT&T on queering more sales.
You don't actually expect them to be responsible for poor coverage AND capacity do you? Not on the chicken scratch they get from customers every month that pay the same as VZW customers! Instead they'll give you 3G by hooking into your own broadband at home. Amazing. AT&T = Raising the bar on your dime because we don't want to.
I think it's about time the Futuristic Looking gadgets started showing up in everyday consumers lives. Just think, the Jetson's Lifestyle is sorta upon us, sans jet car....
CANCER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
After suffering unreliable to non existent phone signal in my rural house I went on eBay and bought a mobile repeater - an AnyTone AT-600 which has a yagi aerial (point at nearest mast 5 miles away) and a mini aerial (position in house). I then discovered that half my issue was having 18" brick walls all through the house. 5 bars in 1 room 0 bars next door.
So I installed a splitter and another internal antenna - now I have 2-5 bars all over the house.
I can use GPRS but as others said when I'm at home my phones are on WiFi for data.
Of course it cost near £200 for the hardware, my time for the install and it's costing me 8W an hour for power it but there's no cost to pay 02 and I could also use Vodafone who use the same bands in the UK so I'm not tied to one provider. As there are no available 3G masts near me nor any plans to upgrade the ones there are I figure it's worth the cost (I work at home) YMMV.
I kind of want this, but it doesn't seem like a reliable replacement for a landline phone - now you've got multiple points of failure possible. Lose power and obviously your dead, but also just lose internet service over your DSL/whatever and you're dead. Also I figure there is a service they are providing to give you this and it could fail even when you've got internet service. I probably should just keep my landline and not pay them $150 for this box. If it were $50 or less I'd be in, though.
Just did a full review on the MicroCell I picked up yesterday.
http://jasonnash.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/review-of-the-att-3g-microcell/