AiravePirate

Installed an Airave this weekend at a friends house where cell services is awful. You can use your phone outside ok, but inside, zero to no bars and switching back and forth from roaming. Verizon also has spotty service inside as well. I got the Airave off of eBay and hooked it up. Now there is full coverage throughout the house and even just outside the house! Data speeds are about 1.00 to 2.00 Mbps download, and about 0.80 Mbps upload. Sure beats a dead battery in a few hours, and you can actually talk on the phone without random drops and choppy connections.

I know this is an old post, but, for the record, bars are not an accurate indicator of signal strength on a femtocell. The bars are used to measure signal on a macro. Might do better to go into "field test" mode on your phone. You can get a more accurate indication of your Dbm's there.

Republic Wireless is interesting. They basically bundle what you do with Google Voice enabled apps (not using Google Voice or needing Google Voice account) on your phone with the ability to go on the road and use macros (cell towers). They say it's seamless and I know someone that uses them and does not complain.

My phone would not connect to the airave so they sent me a new one.  However after awhile it started to occur again, so I called tech support and they told me to put my phone into "Sprint Only" mode for roaming and it seems to be working now.  When coming into airave coverage my phone data connection was not switching over and that was the problem.  But having to turn the feature on and off is a pain because when I go to school I must roam.  Hopefully they are working on this issue.

 

The fix for now is to put the roaming options into "Sprint Only" and this should help most of you guys. 

For some phones it's called "CDMA Only". Some of the newer phones (read: "triband") can have these issues. Once the Airave vendor releases new firmware updates, I'm sure it'll clear some of these issues.

I wonder if this could be a work around "fix" for Airave's and tri-band phones without needing to disable LTE at home.

That's a theory for sure. The firmware on the phones has not yet been released. Just realize, you will need wifi at the location, obviously.