Bijan Sabet

Review: AT&T 3G MicroCell

I was in a meeting last week with a startup and the founder mentioned that long awaited AT&T MicroCell was available.

My phone barely works in my house. Most of the time incoming calls go straight to voicemail. So when this founder gave me the news, I immediately added it to my to-do list and picked one up yesterday.

The AT&T MicroCell is a femtocell that essentially puts a mini 3g base station in your house. Your AT&T phone connects to the unit over the cellular network and the unit connects to the network with your broadband connection.

It’s designed to improve coverage - voice & data.

Setting it up was pretty straightforward:

1. The first step is activating the device on AT&T’s website. After you activate it, you create an authorized list of phone numbers. These are the phones that can connect to your femtocell. You can add up to 10 numbers while only 4 can use it simultaneously.

2. Then you simply power it & connect the unit to your router. Very simple. Steps 1 & 2 took 5 minutes.

3. The next step is simple but long. You wait. For approx 90 minutes (I was warned by the instructions of this delay). That’s the time it takes to get provisioned. Once the unit is successfully provisioned, the 3g light goes solid green and you receive a confirmation text message. Then your phone will show it’s connected to the AT&T MicroCell as you can see here in mine:

But all of this really doesn’t the matter. The real question is does the MicroCell works?

And in my experience….it does not. It’s rather lame actually.

If I make a call and then walk 40 feet away from the microcell my call drops. Everytime. The range is poor and it doesn’t switch from the unit to the local tower during a call like it’s supposed to.

Now I’m not quite sure if it’s the femtocell itself or maybe it’s the iphone and this femtocell. But it doesn’t work for me.

I’m crushed.