AT&T MicroCell

After having a terrible time with AT&T cellphone reception at home for my iPhone, I purchased an AT&T MicroCell the past October which has pretty much eliminated dropped calls and “can you hear me now” reception problems. For the amount of money paid, if you can get over the fact that it should work in the first place (so why pay more), the MicroCell is worth it. In addition to being affordable to anyone who has the budget for an iPhone, the thing just works and only needs to be rebooted about once a month.

Why get it

Reception on AT&T iPhones is notoriously bad in the US. Talk to anyone, and they’ll tell you a tale of woe. As one person put it, “I’m on Verizon because I believe I should have a phone that makes calls.” For love of the iPhone, my wife and I suffered with near non-working reception in our home for a little over a year. If you wanted to make or receive a call, going to the back porch seemed the best option, and even that was dicey.

This poor reception covers voice and texting, as well as the 3G data network. If you have wifi at home, the 3G network is less important, but not being able to use your phone and txt people is stupid, esp. when you look at that $60-80 iPhone bill each month.

Buying the MicroCell

For some reason, the MicroCell isn’t available everywhere. I’d been checking my area for awhile, and once AT&T’s Uverse became available in my neighborhood, I figured the MicroCell would too: sure enough, it was. Once I hooked up AT&T’s Uverse (maxed out the top speed, of course), I also picked up a MicroCell. It was actually really easy: just go to the closet AT&T store and buy one. Having a physical store where you can actually do things like this is nice (in contrast, beyond initial setup, try doing “complicated” things like trading leased equipment at a Clear store).

After rebates and promotions at the time, I ended up paying $100 for it. One thing AT&T does that I loath is giving rebates in the form for “gift cards” instead of just cash or a credit – as long as you go and transfer them to some more general gift card (I bought Amazon Gift Certificates for myself), it’s no big deal, but it’s tedious and the cards never worked at stores I tried.

By default, voice minutes are deducted as normal. You can pay a small fee to get unlimited voice when you’re making calls on the MicroCell. But, since both my wife and I already carry an absurd number of roll-over minutes (read: we don’t use all the minutes we buy each month, the absolute minimum), we didn’t need unlimited voice. And that’s with us using our phones as our primary phone.

Setting up the MicroCell

Once you unbox it, you plug the MicroCell into the wall and then plug in an Ethernet cable to its port – with the new AT&T Uverse 2Wire modem with a gaggle of Ethernet ports, this was easy.

Then to activate the MicroCell, you log into the web admin console, setup some basic info like the address (due to some FCC regulations, I believe, you have to register the location of the device – you can move it around but have to re-register it) and the phone numbers of the phones that can use the MicroCell. I added my wife and I’s and a few of our friends who I knew had iPhones and would be over frequently. You can add up to 10 numbers, and 4 can be used at the same time.

Then it’s just the usual matter of waiting some unspecified time for it to “finish” cooking. The manual said it could take up the 24 hours, but it was pretty quick.

And then it starts working, you’re ready to go.

Daily Use

Once you have it hooked up, you’ll see “AT&T M-Cell” as your carrier on your iPhone. You should have 4 to five bars coverage as well. Mine fluctuates, as the above picture shows.

The MicroCell doesn’t fix reception issues 100%. Every few weeks, a call will get dropped and more frequently, dialing out will take a noticeably long time. I haven’t really kept track, but anecdotally it’s just fine. The reception we get now is leaps and bounds above what it used to be.

When you’re leaving your house, you can stay on the phone and your call will jump to the normal network (which in my neighborhood means it goes down in quality). If you’re arriving home, you’re call won’t jump to the MicroCell. I’ve had a few crappy moments leaving as my network quality goes down, but I don’t come and go chatting on the phone that much.

With these box-with-cords home devices, you’re always on cold-reboot watch. Inevitably, the magic box stops working and you need to reboot it to restore service. For the most part, the MicroCell is set-it and forget-it. Occasionally, once every 1-2 months, I have to hard reboot the device because my phone isn’t connecting to it. This is the standard box-with-cords procedure: unplug the power, wait a few seconds, and plug the power back in. Then things are back to normal for the next 30 to 60 days. I’ve had to restart my 2Wire AT&T router/modem more often.

Overall: worth it

The MicroCell is worth it if you’ve had reception problems at your home. It’s frustrating to have to pay more (just a one time charge though) for something that should work in the first place, but, as they used to say: wish in one hand and spend money on Apple-related products in the other and see which one fills up first.