Verizon Wireless Starts Selling In-home Cell Phone Boosters for $250

Many people are dropping the traditional home phone service and relying solely on their mobile phones. With the implementation of unlimited calling plans by most major carriers, now more than ever, is the best time to say goodbye to your old phone and hopefully save yourself some money doing so. In an effort to help consumers be able to go strictly wireless, Verizon Wireless has started to sell book-size cell phone boosters for $250.

The boosters act like little mini cellular towers and pick up on a phone's signal in a range of 5,000 square feet. Anyone who has ever had a call dropped in their house knows why this is important. While certain parts of a house will get outstanding reception, the same house can get lousy reception if the customer is in a different room of the house. With the booster, this problem would be eradicated (source: tech.yahoo.com).

Verizon's mini-tower like cell booster is called a "femtocell" and works by relaying voice and low speed data communications to the cellular customer. The Verizon femtocell is not the first of its kind as last year Sprint Nextel began selling their femtocell under the brand name Airave for $100. While Verizon's cost of $250 is higher than that of Sprint Nextel, Verizon will not charge a monthly fee to use the femtocell as Sprint Nextel does (they charge a $5.00 per month fee). Both Verizon and Sprint Nextel get their boosters from Samsung Electric Inc (source: tech.yahoo.com).

AT&T Wireless is also experimenting with the new technology and has placed their version of the femtocell in select homes of their employees (source: news.yahoo.com). AT&T Wireless will also focus on the transfer of "3G" data (higher speed) connections (source: tech.yahoo.com).

It makes sense when you think about it. The cellular phones of today are far superior to anything we have had in the past. The days of having to rack up a cell phone bill and a regular phone bill have come and gone. It is no longer necessary to hold on to your old home phone that could be costing you hundreds of dollars or more per year. About the only excuse that was left for those holding on to their antiquated handsets is that they just couldn't get reception in their homes. Well that excuse is gone now too with the implementation of the cell boosters. Soon all major carriers will have some form of the femtocell and the home phone as we know it will simply fade away.

Really it is nothing more than a changing of the guard. Once upon a time people communicated with smoke signals and at the time that was cutting edge technology. But the implementation of newer and better technologies put the old ways to rest as the cell phone is slowly doing to the home phone.