How I raised the bar with a small cell

As with so many people nowadays, my business life does not consist of a defined nine to five period when I am sat at my desk and switch off the minute I leave the office. About as much of my working day seems to be spent at home as it does at my " official " place of work. This means that, since my clients do not know where to find me at any one time, my mobile is probably my most essential business tool.

Obviously, the advent of Blackberries and Smartphones has made mobile communication even more effective as they bring so much more data transmission and reception into the mobile orbit. The only downside I found was that all this extra data traffic seemed to be making voice quality even more erratic.

Both my home and my office appeared to be in areas where signal strength was dodgy to say the least. Some of my friends politely suggested that this was indirectly my own fault by my helping to clog up the network with increased data traffic. However, this somewhat tongue in cheek jibe didn’t exactly ring true because it was quite clear to me that my reception problems existed long before smartphones were ever dreamt of.

I had reluctantly concluded some time ago that both my home and my office were disadvantaged purely through an accident of geography and that they were either right on the edge of a macro cell or subject to some heavy duty interference such as thick walls or even hills. It was either a case of moving somewhere else or just accepting that, every time an important client rang, I would have to race to the other end of the room or stick my head out of the window.

Then, one day, quite by chance, I had one of those Road to Damascus moments when everything suddenly became a lot clearer. This sudden enlightenment occurred when a friend of mine who had a similar problem mentioned that his carrier, Vodafone, had suggested that he try out a relatively new gadget known as a small cell or, more specifically, a femtocell.

These are effectively mini- masts which you can install in your home or office to boost your signal strength to 5 bar quality. They do this by running your calls along your broadband connection rather than via the mobile network. By chance, Vodafone also happened to be my own service provider so I thought it was worth risking the modest £50 it costs to acquire one of these gadgets. All I knew was that these femtocell units went by the quite logical brand name of Sure Signal and I suppose I found it quite comforting to discover from the sales assistant that they had been flying off the shelves since they first arrived. It suggested to me that there were plenty of others in the city who had been enduring erratic signal strength and that it was not just me that had been singled out for special treatment.

My friend had already described to me what a small cell actually looked like. Far from being like a model of the Eiffel Tower, it very much reminded me both in terms of size and shape of my router. When I got it home, I found the instruction booklet reassuringly short and soon had my unit up and running. Basically all I had to do was log on to the Vodafone website and register the mobile numbers I wanted to use with the unit. Then it was simply a matter of plugging it into the power and running the ethernet cable provided into a spare port on my broadband router.
The effect was virtually instant as my signal strength showed up as maximum regardless of where I was standing. I couldn’t wait to call my mate who had put me on to this little gadget, not only to thank him, but to try out the fixed line quality signal for the first time.

As for my other friends who were accusing me of helping to overload the network with my own data traffic, I shall take great pleasure in telling them that my small cell now routes my domestic calls over the internet rather over mobile macro cells. I am therefore now contributing in my own small way to reducing rather than increasing traffic over the network.

I have 2 work colleagues who will obviously be envious of my new 5 bar freedom at home. Maybe having seen a small cell in action, they will be persuaded to switch over to Vodafone so we can all benefit from installing a Sure Signal in the office.