Three Home Signal, anyone got one?

[hecatae]

http://www.three.co.uk/homesignal


Home Signal can help enhance your indoor signal. You may be eligible to get a Home Signal box if you have trouble connecting to the network indoors, you live in a rural area or if your house has thick walls that block your signal.

You need a 3G Three phone to use the Home Signal box and up to four phones can use it to send or receive calls, texts or data at any one time. You can also register up to 32 different numbers with it, so your friends and family can use their phones in your home, as long as they're on Three. You can set up your Home Signal box so that only the people you've given access to will be able to use it.

To set up your family and friends on your Home Signal box, just fill in our online form.

The box can send out a signal for up to 15 metres and on average, it's likely to use around half a gigabyte of your Home Broadband allowance per month, depending on your usage. An hour talking on the phone uses around 37MB of data.

To use the Home Signal box, you need:

a 3G Three phone and SIM
the Home Signal box, green Smart Card, Ethernet cable and power cable
a fixed line Home Broadband connection and router with a spare Ethernet port
a minimum speed of one megabits per second (check your speed at www.speedtest.net)
a spare mains plug socket.
Setting up your Home Signal box.

You can find out how to set up and use your Home Signal box here.

Returns.

If you leave us, or you’re still having indoor coverage problems with the Home Signal box, call 0800 358 4828 so we can discuss your signal issues further.
If you’re upgrading, the normal 14 day money back guarantee applies.

Note:

You can only use a Home Signal box in your UK home, for non-business purposes. If you move, you must let us know your new address before using the Home Signal box in your new home.
We can’t guarantee that coverage will reach outdoors.
The Home Signal box will use some of your Home Broadband data allowance. You should check your data limits and keep track of your usage so you don’t go over your allowance.
Only eligible people will be sent a Home Signal box. To find out whether you might be eligible, call us on 333 and select option 3.

I think Ben's eligible for this

[Ben]

I don't think they're actually 'out out' yet :(

The Business team couldn't help me get hold of one. But that they're on the way is fantastic - I'm counting the hours to leaving Vodafone I can tell you!

[sdbillin]

I got one the other week. Called up to cancel as I have a bad signal after moving house. I was originally offered one for £130, but after explaining that I wouldn't need one with another provider I was offered a free one :-)

It's an NEC box. You can register up to four handsets on it by filling in the online form at http://www.three.co.uk/homesignal
Seems OK - gives me a full signal around the house and into the garden, though after a few seconds of being outside my phone picks up the local mast instead.

Only complaint so far is the call quality - some people have said that it echoes a bit and sounds like I'm talking though a pipe. Sounds OK my end though. Might try opening up whichever ports it uses on my router to see if that helps.

[Ben]

Hi sdbillin, welcome to Talk3G!

Thanks for the update! It's good to hear stories of these in the wild. Not so good to hear that Three are making people jump through hoops to get them, though. Lets hope the use of Home Signal purely as a retention tool is short-lived and that Three are able to better integrate the unit into My Three and offer it for general sale in the near future...

I'll call up this week if I get chance and see if I can coerce someone into taking mercy on me.

Let us know if opening up those ports helps with the call quality! :)

[Hands0n]

The "echo" and sounding like you're "talking through a pipe" are classic VoIP characteristics that have persisted since the earliest days of digital voice. The possible reason that the other party hears these characteristics is likely to be the relatively low-speed uplink data speed of the ADSL connection. Ideally it will be 768Kbps, but could be lower depending on line length from the exchange. If the Three Home Signal is contending with other data use on the uplink it will cause audio aberrations to be introduced. There is not much you can really do about it other than limit uplink usage when on a call, highly impractical.

Femtocell technology is far from perfect and challenges such as ADSL uplink (to the ISP) will persist.

[kevwright]

I just got one delivered yesterday, and setup it all up, only to find there is no improvement here at all. It does go up to full 5 bars for a second or two, but soon drops back to either the same as before (1 bar) or actually lost service!

All a bit odd. And then, this morning, I have no phone or Broadband at all, Sky are looking into it, and I am sure the two things are not remotely connected? Seems odd though. I have also had more No Service from the phone this morning than usual, but again, must be co-incidence?

[Ben]

Curious. It sounds like the intermittent Home Signal performance is probably linked to your broadband bombing out.

What has caused the broadband issues isn't so clear...

[ChippendaleMupp]

I just got one of these. Can't get it to connect. It flashes red in bursts of 5 at a time. The troubleshooting only provide explanations for flashing 1-4 in a burst. Doh!

I think this is the technology developed in Bath by Picochip. So it's nice to see it being used in the UK.

[Ben]

Hi ChippendaleMupp, welcome to Talk3G!

I suppose most connection issues are going to be related to the local network environment - perhaps you could tell us a little about that?

I don't use a standard consumer ISP at home and that caused me all sorts of problems with Vodafone's Sure Signal (they have a whitelist of allowed IP ranges), so that could be another consideration.