Flight Statistics (since 1/1/2009)

Friday, September 26, 2008

Cell phone usage at home

My home is located at the edge of a mobile phone cell, which means that my reception in house is pretty unreliable. As my business contacts tend to call me on my cell, poor reception is very inconvenient, so I have been looking for a solution.
There used to be three possible solutions:
  1. A cell repeater, expensive and complicated to install, especially if you need to use 3G connections.
  2. A supplementary antenna, ties the phone pretty much to one location in the house.
  3. Femtocell, which is another form of repeater, and needs to be provider supplied. My carrier (AT&T) has not started with them yet, although there are rumors. T-Mobile and Sprint do have solutions.

Recently I discovered a new solution, cordless phones that have a built-in Bluetooth link. This allows you to pair your phone with the base station, and then use the cell phone as one of the outgoing, or incoming, lines. GE has the Cell Fusion models, and Panasaonic has Link2Cell. I recently purchased the GE model, which is a DECT system (as is the Panasonic), so no interference with your in-house Wi-Fi either.

I now leave my cell phone in the front room, where I do get some reception. When the cell phone rings, a second later the GE handset starts ringing too, and shows that the incoming call is through my cell phone, and includes caller ID information. The base station is also connected to our (VOIP) landline, so the GE handset acts as a two (or three) line set. Yes, three lines, if I pair my wife's iPhone with the second BT channel. I also use the handset to initiate outgoing calls through the cell phone, for business calls where I do not want to expose my home number through caller ID.

Being a DECT system the phone works well throughout the house, so I do not need to worry about missing cell phone calls anymore. Right now I only have a single handset, but the base station can accommodate up to six handsets. As my current DECT cordless handsets break, they will be replaced by the GE handsets. I am still playing around with some of the features, like distinctive rings for specific callers, and I believe that I can also assign a different ring between landline and cell phone calls. Audio quality is as good as our other cordless handsets, and the ringer is much louder.

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