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Cellphone Carriers Try To Control Signal Boosters
digitaldc writes "[Repeaters], which cost from $250 to $1,000, depending on how much they increase a signal, work by first capturing cell signals through an external antenna, ideally affixed to the roof of a dwelling. A coaxial cable then transmits the signal inside the house to an amplifier and internal antenna, which strengthen and retransmit it to cellphones...
In March, CTIA-The Wireless Association, which represents cellular service providers, filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission demanding stricter regulation of signal boosters."
I clicked through Google news to get it "free"... http://news.google.com/news/search?q=stricter+regulation+of+signal+boosters
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
which is for carriers to improve their coverage, doesn't even occur to them, eh.
Customers so desperate to be able to use a sucky service that they're willing to do the job a carrier ought to be doing... how many other businesses would *kill* to have that problem?
From TFA,
"Supported by separate filings by AT&T and Verizon, the CTIA claims that boosters interfere with cellular networks and disrupt service to customers. As a result, CTIA has asked the F.C.C. to require that “the use of signal boosters be coordinated with and controlled by commission licensees and the sale and marketing of such devices be limited to authorized parties.” "
In other words, "we want exclusive rights to sell them, and not because it will make us tons of money and save the cost of improving our networks in poorly covered areas, we are actually looking out for consumers".
While I'm sure their motivations are at least somewhat greedy, I can't imagine the frustration of living next door to a guy who has a poorly configured or broken repeater that prevents me from making calls.
tough call...
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Your repeater is not reliable enough?
If you read the article, the carriers have femtocells. So basically, the carriers want to have the entire financial pie to themselves. They can't do that if other parts of the commercial sector are competing with them, and with potentially better devices as well. So, instead of simply providing a better solution, they're approaching the government to regulate them into oblivion. After all, a government imposed oligopoly is just as good as one they generated themselves.
I wanted to know "why" the cell companies don't like these boosters. What's wrong with wanting to give your cellphone better reception or transmission?
They like the boosters, but want regulation that prevents competition, i.e. that you will have to buy the equipment from them, at a mark-up.
It's even worse for the cell-over-internet boxes, where you buy internet access and route your home cell phone traffic over them. They want control, so they can continue to charge you air time, plus lease for the box, all for using your bandwidth instead of them paying to put up extra towers.
I have one from Sprint at the office. After arguing that I might as well cancel since it's not my problem and I don't want to pay for their coverage hole, they sent me one for free. It has its bugs, but it works more often than no signal at all.
this is my sig
An old ham radio saying is all an amplifier does is amplify crap.
People get amps to make up with poor cell service, and/or the fact that their tiny little handset does not work in a rural area/congested area.
Since the majority of people out there do not know how to properly install an antenna/transmitter, I am sure that the amps cause all kinds of headaches for the carriers.
Personally I use in my truck a Motorola M900 ( a full power gsm bag phone) for its excellent hands free and for the high power when I need it.
Otherwise I carry my N900 around for portablily and cool features, but I do not expect it to work 20 miles from the nearest tower.
Anyone ever try a passive booster?
Overly simplified: it's basically an external antenna connected to an internal antenna.
Read the third paragraph from the bottom to see what's really happening. Carriers don't want boosters dead, they simply want to become the vendors rather than allow smaller companies a slice of the action.
Furthermore, look at what femtocells, the type of boosters Verizon and AT&T want to sell you, actually do: they "push wireless signals onto the Internet" to improve signal.
That's right, rather than upgrade networks that the iPhone and Droid will saturate to uselessness within the next year (I hear that in NYC AT&T is already almost worthless), they're pushing a device that works around their own incompetence by shoving your "wireless" signal back onto copper, fiber, or coax before it even leaves your house. They're not just avoiding the issue of under-developed networks, they've figured out how to charge you for it.
Rather than trying to ban unregulated devices and trying to transform our cell phones into wireless landlines wherever they can manage it, how about they propose better specifications for the "boosters" that actually boost a wireless signal, or spend some money on their damn networks?
http://jdteck.com/jd55-pr-kit-std-consumer-repeater-kits-p-692.html
Option "I" it's the only repeater on the market that works with T-Mobile 3G in the US.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. ~ Douglas Adams
I think possible interference is a legitimate concern. I don't think requiring the device manufacturers to be FCC type accepted and requiring the repeaters to have variable output is not too much to ask. Hell just mandate the maximum amount of power that can be outputted by the device. I'm pretty sure most of these requirements already exist.
However getting the FCC to only allow the devices to be sold by the carriers or authorized by the carriers make no sense except to create another legal monopoly in repeater sales.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
AT&T and Verizon don't sell boosters, they're femtocells. Same result (better signal), different way to get there (femtocells rely on your existing Internet connection).
No, they DON'T like boosters.
this is a fundamental issue in the way wireless communications works, when you stand in one spot in a city within range of three towers, your cell phone attempts to modulate itself onto a portion of the spectrum that will allow it to speak. This in turn means that all three towers now can hear you.
because all three towers can hear you, but only one is responsible for carrying your traffic the others make that channel unavailable to the people within range of the other two towers. the only thing the towers can do is reduce power to the quadrant the handset is in, allowing people closer to the tower to use it at the same time. even THIS however is limited: if the MobileStation can still reach the other two towers, they can't reduce power far enough to allow anybody else to use those channels.
once you install powered signal boosters, your cell phone now may be able to reach twenty towers. those towers each have a limited number of 'slots' available for users to use, (infact the number of GSM channels is currently around 32, though through timeframing of each channel there are 7-14frames per channel/second) meaning that you effectively are now multiplying your capacity based on how many towers you can hit.
the issue here is NOT with people that are in small towns/remote location, telco's are happy to let people put up their own repeaters to enlarge the telco's network at no cost to the telco. the issue they have is that people in downtown apartments with lead paint think that by hitting every tower in 15 square blocks just so they can repeat it indoors for one customer is a good thing.
by using the air to communicate: you have to learn to share it with others. we only have one global collection of air for which EMR can radiate.
because all three towers can hear you, but only one is responsible for carrying your traffic the others make that channel unavailable to the people within range of the other two towers
This is a overly simplistic explanation. GSM uses frequency hopping for the uplink (i.e: phone to tower) channel to mitigate this sort of interference. The other towers don't perceive your phone as anything other than random background noise. CDMA uses a different mechanism (spread spectrum using a pseduo-random code) to achieve the same results, plus it has the added benefit of being able to do soft-handoffs, i.e: your phone is literally talking to multiple towers at the same time.
The whole point of digital technology is to enable multiple users to share the same channel. Repeaters don't really defeat this. What they can do is increase noise along with signal, usually to the detriment of any phones within range of them. The carriers are rightfully peeved about them because they've spent billions of dollars to license the spectrum that they use and were supposed to have exclusive rights to deploy devices that transmit on that spectrum.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Your house is built with a special alloy of Zirconium and Iridium, and designed by an architect who was a deacon in the church of worshippers of Goser, the traveler. Your place not only kills electromagnetic radiation, it is also spook central.
That's my biggest gripe with most libertarians I've met -- when they finally do concede that large corporations are as much of a threat to liberty as government, they blame government for creating them. Which might be true in some instances (eg, government granted monopoly) but in other instances (eg, Microsoft) it's not, or much less so (and depending on the libertarian philosophy, some are opposed to copyright & patent in any form, which may nullify that answer).
But it strikes me as too easy to *just* blame the government without questioning corporate power at all.
It's fine as long as you buy the carriers' respective rip-off box products, microcells that utilize your internet connection, and relieve their towers of actually having to provide you the wireless service you paid for.
All while still billing you the same rate for "wireless" air time and cell phone data, even though your own wired internet connection has to be used to feed the backhaul for these microsite devices.
So you pay up front for the privilege of running a microsite, to make up for the carriers' crappy networks, and you don't get any discount against cell phone costs for using your own cell tower
Now... if you are the carrier in this very lucrative situation, why the hell would you want to improve your network, or let people run boosters?
It will cut into your bottom line... that is, unless the competition is perceived as improving and having a much better network.
The "competition" factor is easily excluded by making exclusive deals with cell phone manufacturers and offering features people will drool over. People will tolerate your network if it seems to work at all, just to get those fancy devices that you have locked into your network exclusively, through deals with third parties.
Just more evidence that consumers have become sheep.
I, for one, welcome the impending delivery of marshmallows in the form of my new tasty s'moverlord.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Whaaaaaaaaaat!
the wireless spectrum is only so large, and you can only multiplex so many people onto any one frequency. Even if you hop the around frequencies: they still only have so many total channels available. as much as one wants to think that the air will scale indefinitely: it doesn't. every time you add more time-slots to a frequency or frequencies to a conversation: it increases the latency and error rate.
digital technology doesn't quite do the job one hopes it would, as it's still carrying digital representations of analog data. you can only deal with so much latency before it becomes unusable.
Frequency hopping provides a great increase in the number of signals per band, but this comes at a cost to the surrounding frequencies and introduces an amount of CPU load on BTS's. this in turn leads to increased cost and increased complexity of the network. Frequency hopping is only implemented in dense locations, and not all carriers do it. (in fact, the majority of them don't, though this represents the minority of customers)
at the end of the day we agree though: hardly-regulated repeaters that occupy the GSM frequency bands are not the best idea in the world.
This of course is great until you realize that ATT will not allow you to use their femtocell if you have a business account as the cell is limited to five devices which you have to explicitly enable. This means guests of your house won't receive any benefit whereas the repeater in this building helps everyone. This biggest issue I usually have with ATT isn't reception though, after installing the repeater I still get system busy and dropped calls all the time. Fortunately my personal cell is Sprint so when I'm really in a bind I'll just use that. Sometimes in the server room I'm on hold for a long time, sucks to have your call drop after waiting a half an hour.
ATT also locks VOIP out of my phone even though its built into the OS so I can't use the built-in wifi to use my own PBX to make calls. Again, not an issue on Sprint. The owner of the company is almost fed up enough to change, I look forward to the day.
As far as I know, what AT&T and Verizon are selling are 'microcells', basically miniature cell towers that convert your phone's signal to VOIP to get to their network; it uses your home's internet connection.
These are a bit distinct from cell phone boosters, which still has you using your phone company's towers by taking your phone's (likely) .25 watt max power signal and amplifying it to the maximum legal power of 2-4 watts*, often using a directional antenna mounted somewhere outside - like the roof.
This would be fine and dandy at my old place which was like 30 miles from the closest tower. Not so good at my parents, who are in some sort of 'signal depression' such that they have even less signal inside, but lots on the roof, the antenna is only about a mile away. Still, most have automatic gain control, so while one on my house might use the full strength(it's got a lot of distance to cover), even with a directional antenna to give me 4-5 bars, my parents might 'whisper', only needing to avoid the interference that the house adds combined with a better line of sight with the added height of the roof.
I did quite a bit of research on boosters because, well, I had lousy signal in my old(rural) place, but balked at the $500 to do a proper job of it, and it was before microcells started becoming available. Then I found out my job was moving me, and it became academic.
*Actual level dependent upon frequency, country, and other factors.
I don't read AC A human right
Did you even bother to read the contract you signed?
You make it sound like reading through a contract is trivial, and what is written is reasonable because it is written. The things are ubiquitous and intentionally incomprehensible. Every time I've tried to read such service contracts, what I've come away with is "We reserve the right to do whatever we want, and by buying a cell phone you agree to this."
The problem with "boosters" is that they're just amplifiers. They're not players in the cell phone RF protocol system.
Everything that talks in the cell phone bands is supposed to be part of a system that has RF power level control and talks to the cell phone control station. That's what keeps the transmitters from jamming each other. Adding a dumb transmitter isn't helpful. The right answer would be a "femtocell" unit which connects to an external antenna and connected to the cellular network, and is itself a proper player in the RF protocol.
It would be OK to have a booster if the problem was that you're in a remote location and just need some antenna height to get out. (I'm in such a situation; I'm in a semi-rural area and there's a hill between my house and the nearest cell tower.) What's not OK is installing a booster in Manhattan, where you can't get through because the bands are cluttered, not empty. More RF signal strength just raises the noise floor and cuts system bandwidth. In a crowded area, what's needed is another wired path into the network, not more RF power.
A cell phone that could seamlessly transition from a cell phone network to VoIP over WiFi would be consistent with the system design. There ought to be an Android app for that.
The answer should be obvious: if they want this, they need to support the ability of the FCC to enforce Net Neutrality.
What?! What does this have to do with Net Neutrality? It's simple:
Customer: We want Net Neutrality regulations to ensure a true free market!
Telco: No! You cannot tell us how to manage traffic on our networks! Regulation is BAD!
but suddenly the shoe is on the other foot...
Telco: We need regulation to protect the network! Regulation is GOOD!
Customer: You need to manage your network better! You shouldn't make this a less free market to solve technical issues!
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Pretty much.
We can't force the cell phone company to give us good service indoors at our work, but you're always free to threaten to go to their competitor. Would they rather lose a $150/month customer on a multi-year contract, or send you a repeater which likely costs not a lot more than that but keeps you as a satisfied customer?
This is not "legalese"
Correct, it is technically "weasel words" that basically allow the cell phone company to write off any and all problems with service as something out of their control, thus increasing their profit.
Let them get the law but have it regulate all femtocels such that third parties can provide them to end users and carriers cannot charge extra for their use.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Not the football game, I'm talking about 27.025Mhz
How long till we have the tragedy of the commons effect seen on 27MHZ CB...
Libertarian here.
You're right in pointing out that corporations are creations of the state (government). However you are mistaken in understanding of how we might view this sort of thing.
Over Air Frequencies are allotted, and rightfully so, by government lottery or auction. As such it would be quite easy to include terms of the use of those frequencies to include all sorts of "freedom" for end users (public).
In this case, the FCC should have jurisdiction for such devices, and not the corporations. Additionally, the FCC should not even consider the desires and wishes of the corporations but rather should be looking out for the populace as a whole.
Which means, that if the FCC can regulate the devices properly, the corporations would have no say as to how they are used (or not used). And quite frankly, that is exactly what the FCC ought to be saying to the likes of the Telco's.
Where we go wrong in today's corporatism is that the corporations are allowed to petition their creators (the state) to establish profitability of operations. Corporations should not have ANY right to petition the government under any circumstances, as that completely dilutes the power of the populace ability to petition our government with grievances
Like in this case, most people don't care, the ones that do care are not listened to because corporate donations to political campaigns shouts down that voice. And thus, you have the evil of collectivism established which is to quash the voice of the wronged minority.
I blame our government, just not for the reasons you think ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It's simple. Mobile phones were not intended for household use. The 1900 MHz frequency does not penetrate walls very well. Those services (AT&T and VZW) that do have 850 MHz spectrum have moved as much of their voice service and control channels down to 850 MHz as possible because it penetrates walls so much better.
Sprint and T-Mobile are stuck in the 1900 MHz range in most markets. These are the majority of booster customers. The problem is that the boosters mess up an already weak service.
In Sprint's case, it's exponentially worse, since CDMA only works because the handset and the base station carefully agree on power levels, and the booster removes that control, thus causing havoc all over the Sprint CDMA bands.
Kriston