[aklug] Re: AT&T Femtocell (Microcell) Usage in Alaska

On 08/04/2012 11:14 AM, Jim MacDonald wrote:
> So, AT&T Offers a microcell device in the lower 48. Basically it's a femtocell. A small low power cell tower that backhauls through your highspeed internet connection. However, for some reason it's not offered here in Alaska. I was told it's because of the type of Cell Towers that are installed up here…
> Can anyone shed any light on that?
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> Jim MacDonald
> jim@macdonald.org
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I had one of these up here for a while, it didn't really work. It could
technically work, but the problem I ran into is because the cell phone
companies are required to handle 911 and provide a location, you have to
register an address for your pico cell, the pico cell has gps on board,
you set it next to a window when you fire it up, it gets its location,
and hooks into a third party to verify that the address you have
provided is within X amount of feet of the GPS location.

Problem for me was a complete lack of any physical addresses. The only
address I could find was about 5 miles away and well that just didn't
cut it. As well, it looks like the third party provider of address to
GPS coordinate listings does a poor job in some places and it seems to
be damn near impossible to get them to correct that. It may be possible
that the reason they don't sell it up here is because this third party
DB doesn't have Alaska mapped as it were. However, the ATT business lady
who acquired this for me, had no issues with me carting it up here and
she tried really hard to make it work.

However, if you are a city slicker, or relatively nearby, there is no
reason that I can see why it wouldn't work up here.

-Erinn

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Received on Sat Aug 4 11:22:52 2012