That's No Signal Booster

I have a poor cell phone signal indoors, depending on location. I ordered a signal booster from Amazon. The good news is that it works. The bad news is that it doesn't do what I was hoping it would. I can get three bars where before there was a dead spot. That's awesome. What's not awesome is that those three bars don't translate into Mbps. So, if the booster is in a spot that gets 1.5Mbps, despite the three bars the data rate is still 1.5Mbps. If it's in a spot with 5Mbps, I get four bars but still only 5Mbps. It's not really a booster. It's a range extender. That's saddening. Unless I can find the perfect signal spot outside, I may send it back. The perfect spot would be 4 bars with killer Mbps. I'll need to get up on the roof and see what happens but not today.

I got a Roku device on sale. It's pretty cool. I prop my cell phone in a window and turn on the Hotspot. It works great. It doesn't buffer or stutter. One drawback is that I can't get local channels through it because Verizon routes my phone through whatever city, usually LA or NY, making it look like I live there. Locast.org has free, streaming local channels for a variety of cities, but it forces a location check. Roku doesn't have a GPS locator. It defaults to my phone and fails. My local city is Atlanta. The only way I can get local channels is to use the Location feature on the phone. However, that only works for watching something on the phone, which is not my style unless I'm not home. It doesn't tell Locast that my Roku is in the Atlanta region.

Enter the Chromecast. According to tech support at Locast, I should be able to use a Chromecast device to mirror the phone screen on a television. For the price of a Chromecast, I'm supposed to be able to get free, streaming local channels. All of them. I ordered one. We'll see if it works. I wonder if I could send it back in the same box as the signal booster, if it didn't.

There's some great news on the cell phone front. Visible, my cell phone company, is getting 5G with speeds up to 200Mbps for no extra charge. There's no firm date, but it's supposed to be very soon. I ordered the signal booster right before finding that out. I may not need the booster at all, or it may not work with 5G. However, 5G is not available here yet, and I don't know when it will be. Plus, I don't have a 5G phone. With 5G I'd be able to convert my home network to that and have whole house internet without worrying about speed bottlenecks. Hypothetically, I could be on the computer and have both televisions streaming HD shows at the same time. I'll know more soon.

Have a great weekend.