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Hi there I'm Pete Scargill and this is about the THREE
Home signal box.
To give you a little bit of background first about Orange for years from my
mobile phone
I live in the village of Wark in Northumberland and like a lot of villages, no mobile signal
whatsoever.
So,
I looked atVodafone who do a little box that plugs into your broadband
and they were going to charge for that...
anyway I looked around and I eventually went with the company
THREE partly because of their unlimited broadband
offer on their mobile phones
Of course, THREE don't have a signal either, nobody does in the village
Anyway, a friend of mine in the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB)
contacted me to say HEY, THREE are making these little boxes available,
They're called a FEMTOCELL
So, I rang up THREE,
told them my situation
no signal where i live
and sure enough, today,
this box turned up so this review is going to tell you about the box
I have my mobile phone here
and you probably can't see it, but
take my word for it no signal whatsoever ever so it's a dead brick apart from
WIFI
when I am at home which is a major inconvenience - as you can see this is my office
as well
on so i'm hoping this is going to solve the problems, maybe it'll solve yours.
Here's the Home Signal box,
turned up this morning
after a brief conversation with the call centre at THREE
at no charge for this, that's confirmed
in the piece of paper that came with it that says "Home Signal box"
which is an NEC Femto Home
signal
SIM pack
or rather includes the SIM pack so this will be set to work with
mine and my wife's
mobile phones and not just anybody in the street opposite so they asked me
which phone numbers this needed to work with. So, we will open the box of how to look
inside
and then we'll plug it into my broadband and see how that works!!!
Ok, so opening the box we find a
British mains
power supply
and a lead to
plug into your router
and.
the usual very skimpy paperwork
and the little THREE
FemtoCell box which looks neat enough, it's very light,
they've already put.....
I don't know if you can see there that have already put the SIM inside inside
and that's just going to sit somewhere and act as a radio transmitter and
receiver so a little bit of
thought as to where this goes
will determine the range it's got.
Obviously you want to use your mobile phone at home where you have no signal
you'll want to use it around the home you're going to have to position this
to get the best coverage
around the home... I'm thinking personally because I happen to have
a router in the loft of putting it in the loft and then it would cover the
widest range possible but let's get it working first.
So, the SIM is already
apparently, the have have done this for me
so or in theory all I have
to is plug it into the mains,
plug it into my broadband router
and maybe that's it??
Let's see!!
SO, here's what I did.
I
plugged the unit into the mains, plugged it into my
broadband router
and . first thing that happened was, the red light flashed second and then a GREEN
flashing light.
Instructions said...
that the green light will go solid
when connected to
THREE
but that didn't happen the first time so I've checked the cables, switched it off, switched it on,
sure enough
GREEN LIGHT!!
Went went back to my mobile phone nothing, still searching,
but within
twenty seconds...
"From THREE, your parcel will be delivered today..."
a text message from THREE
That's a text messages from THREE - I can't receive text messages here as I don't get a signal...
So, that's solved that problem,
text messages are coming in...
If you look in the corner..
well, you can't because this isn't going to focus
however right there it says
a signal from THREE.
Five bars just as if i was in a good signal area
so that is now a working phone. The next thing to check,
is range.
My cottage here is made out of stone
so what I'm going to try now is to go to the other side of the building.
And so here I am, back again...
I've just had a conversation with somebody on the mobile phone
the same time as a text message came in
towards the far end of the house, the signal is getting weak
so I would say it's about as powerful as a typical WIFI
setup so you really want to put this little box in the center of the
somewhere. Other than that, you can have FOUR people talking at once, and
according to this you can register up to 32 THREE numbers,
obviously only THREE customers
so if you have friends and family visiting
and they would not normally be able to get a signal either
they can then use their mobile phones
which for free
seems like a damned good bargain to me.
So there you have it
the Home Signal box from THREE