The Real Reasons Cell Phone Boosters Are Suddenly Taboo

Cellphone carriers now offer their own solution to the coverage problem in the form of femtocells: small cellular base stations that expand a localized coverage area up to 5,000 square feet. These femtocells are available for a fee, although in some cases, carriers have quietly offered them at no charge, and represent another revenue opportunity that signal boosters could be taking away. The carriers also sell additional service plans with femtocells; AT&T customers, for example, can pay $20 extra per month for unlimited voice calls made through the device.

Clearly, there's a financial benefit for carriers to corner this market, but there are additional incentives for them to want to shut out signal boosting device companies. Femtocells take traffic from the handset and offload it away from the cellular operator's wireless network; customers connect a femtocell to their existing home wired broadband which handles the traffic. In effect, femtocells reduce the demand for a carrier's wireless infrastructure as opposed to standard signal boosters, which still keep voice and data traffic on the operator network.