Do you suffer from poor mobile coverage at home or office?
October 24, 2009
Tags: Comment, Communications, Mobile, Telecommunications
I may be pointing out the obvious to some, but it came as news to me. I have poor to non existent mobile coverage at my home and office. At no extra cost I now have coverage. How you may ask? If you have wireless broadband, a BlackBerry which is WiFi enabled, and you are on the Orange or T-Mobile networks you can set up your BlackBerry to choose your own WiFi network at home or work and you will be able receive and make calls on your phone. How good is that?
I understand that this is only applicable to BlackBerry, but suspect that other mobiles with WiFi capability may well work. I also assume that the other networks, Vodafone, Three and O2 will be able to offer this in due course.
There is another answer for Vodafone users. It is called a Vodafone Access Gateway.
This device costs £160 inc VAT and plugs into your ADSL router. It generates a Vodafone 3G signal for a 30 metre radius, your phone connects to this signal and the calls are processed by the device over the ADSL line .
The device can carry up to four concurrent calls and the user can register up to 30 mobile numbers to work with the device.
See our web-site for a special offer to be launched in the next few days.
Thanks for the reply. I felt that there should be others in the market. The Vodafone solution looks more like a Medium sized SME solution to me, rather than the residential / SOHO solution I think the BlackBerry solution will solve, as it is potentially a no cost solution, if the user tick the boxes of kit they have already. For large and corporate organisations I know that Avaya and Nokia have a very good WiFi / GSM solution, which routes across the landlines from the PBX and will “Roam” in and out of the WiFi network to the GSM network without dropping the call. All good interesting really useful technology, to many people.
It is interesting to note that Vodafone see the current device as residential / SOHO and have sold several thousand of them.
There will be an SME device later which will be more sophisticated; allowing serveral to be linked to form a local network and more users to be connected.
By allowing up to four concurrent users the Vodafone unit provides a competitive solution to poor or non existent coverage. The intelligence in the market suggest that no other UK network has managed to solve the technical problems with this “Femtocell” technology.