Cell phone signal booster

Anyone have any experience with cell phone signal boosters? I live in a rural area and my house is kinda in a "bowl". If I'm standing outside or upstairs in my house service is fine. If I'm downstairs (1st/ground level) it is okay the majority of the time unless the weather is crappy outside. There are days where downstairs calls are dropped regularly. I have no service in my garage (It is a pole building with tin on the outside and finished inside with tin as well). Looking at signal boosters to try and help with the situation, but they are price from a few hundred $ to a few thousand. Really don't want to spend more than I have to, but would like to have a little better service. Our phones are Verizon if that matters for the boosters.

Here at work, we are between towers and they keep trying to hand the call off to each other .. and, we are in a large steel building .. they put some boosters up and , although its not 100% fixed .. much , much better than before

Give Verizon a call and complain. If you show cause maybe they will do something and put the booster in for you.

Old school solution:

Call-forward your cell phones to your land line and use a cordless phone. You can get cordless phone packages that come with the base and 3 phones, so there is always a phone nearby.

The call quality and reliability can't be beat.

If you have hardwired internet at your house Verizon can supply you with a “Femto-cell” unit that basically creates a mini-cellphone tower. Verizon used to charge $140 for these but I think they now give them free to customers with bad signal level.

T-Mobile and their re-seller Mint Mobile allow cellular over WIFI which works well for me.

Mint Mobile is only $18.50 per month for unlimited talk/text and 3 Gigs of data. They also allow cell phones to set up WIFI hotspots using the cellular connection.

I put a Sure Call system in for my parents last year. About $500 for the whole deal. It does help out enough that we all can make calls and do texting, whether Verizon or ATT. They are only a couple miles from a Verizon tower, but live down in a REALLY low spot, and have a metal roof. I need to get a taller pole for the outside antenna, and dial in the direction a little better this year. Would have gone with the Weboost system, but my parents did not want to spend the extra $$$; at least double the price of comparable Sure Call system.

My parents had zero to 1 bar on their Verizon phones. I never got a signal on my ATT phone there. With the booster as it is now, they get 1-4 bars, and I get 0-3 bars, depending on if there is a lot of rain, and how we are positioned, with regards, to the interior antenna.

My folks were on Verizon for years, on a hard line, but they have fazed themselves out of the land line systems in the area my parents live in. And there is nothing for internet where they live, except for Hughes satellite internet. The suggestion for wifi phone operation is a poor one, if you are on satellite internet; there is always a lag in the data, which leads to a 2-10 second lag in your voice going across the connection, which is extremely annoying, to the point of being useless for conversation. The Verizon "signal booster" that they offer is based on internet, so it is also useless for a staellite internet connection.

We don't have a landline phone, just cell phones.

Our home internet is satellite internet as there is no companies that run lines to the area I live. I even contacted Comcast one time about it, and they said they had no intention of expanding to included the area in which I live. It's not real remote, just not very populated. Mostly farm land, but not nice and flat.

Most new RV's have "signal boosters" on their roofs from the factory, maybe check into those.

When we moved here we had been using T mobile for over 10 years with never an issue.

But our home location service was weak, sometimes none existent. We called and told them and the reply was they knew it was weak in our area. They sent us a booster for free , sad to report but it did nothing.

We ended up switching to ATT , and have had zero problems since

We had to get signal boosters for our work trucks. While maybe not the same thing you want, this company had a large variety of options. When we are at well pad sites in the middle of nowhere on top of a mountain etc, it works wonderfully.

I do not personally know whether the longer latency of satellite internet would prevent a Verizon Femtocell or Mint Mobile WiFi calling from working but you might call Verizon and ask.

For $5 Mint Mobile will sell you a SIM card to try out their service, then refund the $5 if you buy at least 3 months of service.
Google Fi cell service does something similar with a $10 SIM card you can buy at Best Buy stores.

We have several buildings at work with signal boosters in them but all costed big bucks from whatever the cellular carrier was.

If you don't care about having your phone on you I have a unit at home that has normal phone plugs on it and connects with your cellphone with bluetooth and lets you use regular phones. You can leave that and the phone where the signal is good and use a cordless phone with it where the signal is bad. Not the best solution but for the $25 or so it costed it works.