voda sure signal

mel d · 26 Mar 2010 at 10:09

hi, so in my house i can only get connection for texts when my phone is on the window handle in the front room.a sure signal would be ideal but i was wondering if there are any other device's or routers on the market that do the same as the sure signal ? give 3g coverage in home from broadband connection (phoneline)..
cheers mel

paradigm · 26 Mar 2010 at 10:21

As far as I'm aware there are no other carriers with home-user femtocells at the moment. You're stuck with the Vodafone option for the time being.

bigredshark · 26 Mar 2010 at 12:07

Unless of course your phone supports UMA (which basically means it's a blackberry at the moment) and then all you need is a carrier who'll play ball and a wireless network. Personally I think it's the way forwards rather than femtocells as it avoids extra equipment and it works nicely for me with my 8900 on Orange with third party internet.

PistolPete · 26 Mar 2010 at 13:44

paradigm said:
As far as I'm aware there are no other carriers with home-user femtocells at the moment. You're stuck with the Vodafone option for the time being.

No quite true as Orange have had their "Unique Phone" service for a few years (since maybe 2007), but the prerequisite was that it only worked with their Livebox and on an Orange line.

You can buy a repeater, basically it's a high gain antenna on a long length of coax which you mount as high up on your house as you can facing the nearest mast, plugged into a small box which re-radiates the signal inside the house - downside is that they cost £300-400-ish

Gavin · 26 Mar 2010 at 19:15

bigredshark said:
Unless of course your phone supports UMA (which basically means it's a blackberry at the moment) and then all you need is a carrier who'll play ball and a wireless network. Personally I think it's the way forwards rather than femtocells as it avoids extra equipment and it works nicely for me with my 8900 on Orange with third party internet.

can you explain more about this as im interested in this.

bigredshark · 26 Mar 2010 at 20:38

It's a pretty simply concept really, it uses another network medium to route your calls instead of the mobile network. So essentially it detects there's wifi available and then instead of placing calls/etc over the mobile network it routes them over the internet to the mobile network. Simple concept but it can be a touch temperamental, I've found the blackberry and orange combination works fairly well though, it's seamless and works well at home and work where I struggle for orange signal occassionally...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_Access_Network#Devices

Orange UMA Details

Slightly cheekily, they charge you standard rates for all your call despite the fact you're moving the traffic off their site backhaul network and all they need to do is maintain a UNC. But hey, fixes the signal issue...

DJMK4 · 27 Mar 2010 at 18:15

We have got one of those vodafone boxes in work that you plug in to a broadband connection, its made it better but it isnt perfect.

If your going to install one, install it on a connection which has plenty of bandwidth as if the connection is getting hammered 24/7, your gong to get dropped voice packets.

KIA · 28 Mar 2010 at 17:06

DJMK4 said:
If your going to install one, install it on a connection which has plenty of bandwidth as if the connection is getting hammered 24/7, your gong to get dropped voice packets.

Bandwidth management and prioritisation is definitely required!

mel d · 28 Mar 2010 at 18:30

so only way at moment is the voda thing.seems so easy phone line goes to router ,router give wifi signal but cant get texts/calls through wifi.
have to get a suresignal

bigredshark · 28 Mar 2010 at 18:47

mel d said:
so only way at moment is the voda thing.seems so easy phone line goes to router ,router give wifi signal but cant get texts/calls through wifi.
have to get a suresignal

Well if you'd read my posts or the links then you'd see you can get calls over the wifi...