Morning,

I live in an area where the signal is a bit ropey and is even more so in the house.
I am looking at mobile signal boosters and was wondering if anyone has any experiences with them?
Any help or pointers would be appreciated.

Cheers,

Paul.

Vodafone Sure Signal works for us.

When we first moved to the barn even GPRS was pants. Now GPRS is better, but in the house we have 3G connection via our our BB line. We dont use a landline to having a consistent mobile reception is very important (we work from home). Only real issue is in peak evening browsing time, if you try and stream a dense video say, while on the phone the call quality can suffer, but its not often.

Sure Signal had a bad reputation initially as the servers could be very flaky. Ours has been fine for at least 12 months now with no glitches so I think they’ve ironed out any problem.s

Considered the vodaphone one myself but not bought yet. Bought my wife a blackberry on orange and by conisidence have a netgear router. It turns out this is a magic combination of kit and provider to automatically use something called “UMA” to re-route calls via the router (although you still use standard minutes up) for crystal clear phone calls on the mobile. Tis great in an area of awful mobile service for every provider.

I’m with O2 and after a quick Google it appears UMA isn’t an option. 🙁

The mobile boosters are illegal in UK. Technology like Sure Signal is legal 🙂

O2 were looking at a broadband backhaul system like suresignal but it was too tricky for them so canned the development.

Does the sure signal work with only Vodafone phones or will it work with Asda and other companies that use the Vodafone network?

Id be surprised if it worked with asda.

do a google for some forums – if it does work, Im sure someone must have said so somewhere.

EDIT> Ahem
http://www.appleiphoneforum.co.uk/iphone-networks-f27/vodafone-sure-signal-t4660.html

So you end up tied to vodafone – pity

I live in an area where the signal is a bit rope

Is it ropey for all providers? I’ve been in plenty of areas were there’s, for example, no signal on O2, but almost full strength on Orange. Or vice versa.

Yeah, it’s a bit crap for them all unfortunately.

You can buy the repeaters/boosters and antennas from various places, including ebay, but operating them is illegal without a license. They use them inside warehouses, for example, to provide indoor coverage, so may be worth enquiring about license cost for your business?
Otherwise, you could just buy one and use it and that’ll be that, as it sounds like you live in a sparsely populated rural area…

Cel-fi works really well and doesn’t even require broadband – you can get them for O2 and orange / t-mob. The latter is a better bet because it means you can flip your contract between the two networks each year to get the best deal.

http://www.cel-fi.co.uk/

O2 do have a suresignal equivalent but will only offer it when you try and leave. And they want £150 for it.

I tried a booster but my external signal is so marginal that it wasn’t worth it. You can have it if you want.

I use the Vodafone Sure Signal and it works really well (when it’s working). It needs rebooting about once every month as it goes into some kind of hanging ‘updating’ mode.

I can live with that considering I now can actually receive calls at home (it’s an old house with very thick stone walls).

+1 for the SureSignal. Works fine for me at home and worked for an office of +20 mobiles