How to Kill a Cell Phone Dead Zone

I’ll cut to the chase because if you live with a cell phone dead zone in your home (I do), this piece probably has you drooling. The catch is price. These solutions as you will see sounds great, but some are close to $1,000 or involve climbing on your roof. At those prices, I say, keep your land line and put your cell on call forwarding.

By Sam Schechner
Slate
Cellular repeaters are mostly used by businesses that want to boost signal strength inside big office buildings. But now some of these devices are being targeted specifically to the home market. They’re not cheap. Spotwave Wireless, which works with business customers for several carriers, sells home units starting at $995. A smaller outfit called JDTECK, which just became an approved T-Mobile vendor, sells its most pared-down device for $365. (Cellular service providers usually have no problem with the devices, so long as they don’t interfere with their cellular networks, which a Cingular spokesman told me almost never happens. The spokesman did say you should only use a repeater that’s approved by your carrier.)

Do these devices really help? Can a layperson wire them? And what about the risks of installing a miniature cell tower in your apartment?

My first testing ground is a notorious dead zone in a friend’s Brooklyn apartment. A T-Mobile phone by the sink never registers more than one or two bars. (Kitchens and bathrooms frequently have poor reception because they’re close to building cores and shielded by layers of walls and appliances. In general, steel is the most difficult building material for cellular signals to penetrate, followed by concrete and the insulation-coated glass of office buildings. Wood and drywall pose little problem in moderation.)

Repeaters are carrier- and location-specific. A repeater tuned to, say, an 850 MHz Cingular signal is useless in boosting the reception of T-Mobile’s 1900 MHz signal. Both Spotwave and JDTECK sent me repeaters calibrated for the T-Mobile spectrum in New York City, and some simple instructions. JDTECK’s repeater has two components. For inside, there’s a device the size of a light switch with a tiny swivel antenna. For outside, there’s a simple-looking square plate of an antenna. Spotwave’s kit has larger, more sophisticated-looking versions of the same equipment. The outdoor antenna looks like an alien pizza box, and the indoor one looks like its little sibling.

The most important part of the installation is to mount the outdoor antenna in a place with good reception, ideally in the line of sight of a cell tower. Unfortunately, like most New York apartments, this one has no roof access. Complete Story Here

Our Verdict: Sounds like good intentions that quickly turn into a costly, unrealistic, living Hell