• WHAT: Different ways to improve your cell phone's coverage at home
• WHY: Not everyone lives in a 5-bar area
• COST: Depends - $20/month up to $200-one-time

There's been a lot written - even by me - about the best way to improve the cell phone coverage around your house so that you can use your mobile more and your landline less... or eliminate it altogether.  I've written about how to improve your coverage by working with the carriers and the zoning commissions, for example, and how to lobby for additional cell sites near your house.  But all those solutions are very macro-oriented and sometimes you just want to Get It Done.  For those of you in that instant-gratification mode, or if you're thinking about giving up your landline altogether, you'll want some solutions that handle the problem of poor or non-existent coverage right away. 

If you're a customer of Sprint or T-Mobile you're in luck - they're way ahead of AT&T/Cingular and Verizon in working out these issues. I wonder, actually, if that's because the two of them are at the low end of the market share totem pole - they're looking for ways to differentiate themselves and this is a good way to do it.  They're clever solutions from both the perspective of the customer and their own revenue generation.  You'll need a broadband Internet connection for either solution, though, so if you don't have one of those you're out of luck for now.  Allow me to explain. 

Micro, pico, nano - femto?  Yes, femto.  When you're talking about the tiniest of the tiny, the most microscopic of all (at least so far) cell sites, the latest buzz word is "femto."  It's actually one-quadrillionth (I swear I'm not making that up - see HERE) of a whole and Sprint is naming their cell-site-at-your-house product the "Femto-cell."  Now, I'm pretty sure that Sprint didn't go out and measure the size of their sites and are using this in the colloquial sense, but suffice it to say that femto means pretty darn small.  The theory behind this product is pretty simple - it's a cell site in your house.  You continue to use your own cell phone but don't get charged for minutes used while you're at home.  Just plug the "Airave" unit from Sprint ($50) into your current broadband Internet connection and make or receive calls as you always have.  No muss, no fuss, no messy cleanup. 

It costs $15/month if you're using it alone or $30/month if you want it to apply to your family but the advantage, of course, is that if you use your cell phone at home a lot the minutes that you use there - because they're not counted against your allowable minutes - means you might be able to reduce the plan that you're on (fewer minutes) and neutralize that fee.  Right now the product is only available in a couple of test markets - Indianapolis and Denver - but Sprint plans to spread the femto-cell-love nationwide quickly. 

The other approach to this used by T-Mobile uses your broadband Internet connection, too, but in a different way.  When you install the device sold by T-Mobile it, too, connects to your broadband connection but then, instead of using the standard cell phone frequencies and a standard cell phone, it connects via WiFi in the same fashion that you do when you connect your computer at a "hot spot" at the local Starbucks.  T-Mobile calls this "HotSpot @ Home" and it costs $20/month for unlimited calling when you're home... and when you're at any other T-Mobile hot spot including Starbucks and airport spots.  The catch here is that you need a special phone that can switch from the standard cellular connection to the WiFi connection transparently.  Of course, T-Mobile sells those, too and there are, surprisingly, a couple of nice ones.  There's a very nice Samsung unit ($50) and a Blackberry Curve ($250) to choose from.  Once you've bought them, though, and a wireless router (if you don't have one, but any standard wireless router such as a Linksys, Apple Airport, D-Link, etc., should all work) you can make a gzillion minutes of calls from hot spots anywhere without them impacting your allowable cellular minutes. 

The nice thing about both of these services is that you're able to use your cell phone the way that you're accustomed to using it - you can even start a call in your house and then leave the house (and the special connection you've set up) and your call will continue.  It doesn't work quite as well in the other direction (from the cellular network to the house) but that's a fairly nominal compromise and is likely to be resolved sometime soon in any event.  

If you're a Verizon or AT&T/Cingular user, though, you can't use either of these services - and that's too bad.  For you (and for Sprint or T-Mobile users, too, if they choose) there's a very different solution entirely.  Regular readers of this blog know that I've been considering going completely wireless for quite some time but there are some compromises - not the least of which is that you have to carry your cell phone around the house with you because you don't have the luxury of picking up - or making a call - from an extension phone.  Up until recently there wasn't a way to do that, which would have helped wireless users with poor coverage (more on that in a minute) but now there is.  

Just last week, shortly after I finished a conversation with a friend of mine who has patented several products and has forgotten more about patenting than I will ever know, I started reading (as I always do, every day) the Wall Street Journal.  It was a Wednesday, which is the day for "The Mossberg Solution," written by his very capable assistant Katherine Boehret.  I read Mossberg's columns avidly and this one, entitled "Extending Cellphone's Reach" caught my attention right away.  After reading it I called my patent-smart pal and said, "Next!" because we would certainly be skipping my idea - V-Tech had just introduced a product that does (almost) exactly what I was suggesting in the patent application.  

The V-Tech phone concept is simple - your cell phone connects to a cordless base station via Bluetooth and then re-transmits the signal to other cordless units throughout your house.  Simple, brilliant, brilliantly simple - if it works as advertised.  I haven't had the chance to check it out but Ms. Boehret has and generally liked it.  

The nice thing about this from the standpoint of improving your coverage is that you can put the base station anywhere in your house - like upstairs near the patio where you can just barely get a couple of bars on your coverage meter.  Once your cell phone is connected to the base station by Bluetooth, the coverage issue is moot... as long as your cell phone has any coverage at all you can use the other phones around the house without worrying about where they're located.  

So, in short, there are options if you are coverage-deprived.  Which one you choose depends on who your carrier is - and what your budget can handle.