T-Mobile Will Put a Tiny LTE Booster in Your House
T-Mobile competes very well against the larger carriers—namely AT&T and Verizon—on price, features, and CEOs in leather jackets. Where it’s somewhat less competitive is reliable service. To help bolster its performance cred, the company now offers a “4G LTE CellSpot” to help shore up reception at home or at work.
This isn’t the first home improvement project for T-Mobile; it had previously offered a Wi-Fi CellSpot router to achieve similar ends. Since T-Mobile also offers Wi-Fi calling on all of it phones, that theoretically should have done the trick. But Wi-Fi calling can be spotty under the best of circumstances, and 4G LTE reinforcement should suffer fewer hiccups.
It’s also not the first time a company has offered a “mini-tower” to make up for uninspired connectivity. AT&T started selling its 3G “MicroCell” in 2010. The key word there, though, is “selling.” While there have been reports that AT&T customers could complain their way out of a MicroCell fee, it cost $150 at launch. It also only boosts 3G connections, which was fine at the time but is downright pokey by today’s standards.
