Melvin,

But please be careful with which picocells and femtocells are purchased.  Not all of them are blessed by the carriers, and some have been known to cause problems.

We had an instance on campus where a department installed their own system and managed to cause an outage for Verizon for about a ¼ of campus for multiple days.   There are a lot of Chinese and Korean devices out there that are not certified by the FCC or are designed to work on other’s licensed frequencies that reek havock on high-density locations like MSU.

-Nick Kwiatkowski

MSU Telecom Systems

Google picocell and femtocell about small cellphone cells that plug into the IP network.

I’ve gotten a couple of inquiries lately about what can be done to improve cell phone reception within our building.  Mainly it’s “I can’t get my email!” from smartphone users.

I suppose they could go to WiFi, but I’m told this will quickly suck batteries dry (I don’t have a smartphone myself so I don’t have any firsthand experience with that)

Is there such a thing as a cell repeater that can be placed inside a building?  Or some other solution that has worked for folks?

Scott Smith

HR Systems Development and Support

Michigan State University