So I live in a rural area, and while the nearest cell tower is only a few miles away, due to all the trees between the tower and me, I usually have 1 bar of service at best. I literally have to go out to my garage, and lean against my table saw (left side) to get a signal that doesn't drop out. And since I work out of my home, my cell service is important to me. That lead me to "femtocells".
So the use of a "femtocell" seemed perfect. Per Wiki, a femtocell is a small, low-power cellular base station, typically designed for use in a home or small business. And the great news about that is that Verizon offers them direct, so there's little to no technical know-how required as their customer support will handle all the setup headaches (assuming there are some).
To be clear, a femtocell, probably designed, offers a seemless transition and interface between your cell carriers network and a VOIP (via your internet connection). Thus, whether on the road or at home, calls INTO or OUTOF your cellphone occur seamlessly ... nothing you have to do differently.
So I left the Verizon franchise store and instead went to my Verizon company store, gave them my phone number (like you always have to do at a Verizon store) and bought an LTE Network Extender.
I took the unit home, plugged it in an immediately got no service, and instead started getting pinged to "call Customer Service". After 3 days of calling, getting transferred, broken promises of "call backs", promises of elevating this up the "tech food chain", and lots of shoulder shrugging, I finally reached a tech who said "you can't use it ... they should not have sold it to you because LTE Network Extenders are only for Post Paid accounts" (those are the accounts with long term contracts, whereas I have a Pre-Pay account which means I pay month by month).
WHY IN THE HELL DID THEY SELL IT TO ME ???
So I take it back to the store where I bought it and spend an hour with various people there teaching THEM that I can't use it ... that they should not have sold it to me ... and watching them spend 40 minutes on the phone trying to figure out how to get my money back. They eventually sent me home with the promise of a refund, and a month later I saw the refund.
So now I'm left with the original problem, little to no signal and a job that requires stable cell service. So since I'm an "eBay-Whore", I turned to eBay to search for "Pre-Pay LTE Network Extenders". I found several listings, but one buy seemed like the clearest ad so I reached out to him. He understood immediately what my problem was, and he had the answer ... an LTE Extender that works "out of the box". Bought the unit and as promised, worked out of the box. Now I have 4 to 5 bars all the time I'm at home.
