Why You Need an AT&T Signal Booster
Posted on 8/4/2023 by Nicholas Jones
AT&T has lots of customers and good cell coverage, claiming to cover 99 percent of the U.S population. But even so, there are AT&T customers who find they need a cell signal booster because they have weak or unreliable cell service at times. This may happen inside a home, office, or vehicle. But wherever you’re plagued by poor signal, it can be a major disruption.
When this happens, our natural tendency is to point the finger at AT&T, blaming the carrier for our signal woes. However, most of the time the issue is more complicated than that. When your cell coverage is weak, it’s usually not the service provider’s fault. The cause for your poor signal is usually something between you and the AT&T tower that blocks the signal from reaching you at full strength.
What causes poor AT&T cell signal
If you read this blog regularly, you know we’ve posted a video and written a post about this topic. Here’s a quick explanation. Cell phone traffic – including both data and voice – moves via radio frequency waves, just like terrestrial radio program signals. These radio waves can move long distances.
But any time they have to pass through something, they are weakened or blocked to some extent. You know this intuitively from listening to FM radio in your car. When you drive under a bridge, the radio signal is temporarily interrupted.
Common signal blockers
That same thing happens to your phone’s signal. Pretty much any barrier between you and the AT&T tower can block the signal. Unfortunately, this includes any man-made structure, any terrain features like hills, etc., as well as foliage and bad weather.
We haven’t yet talked about your distance from the AT&T tower. Of course, the farther away you are from the tower, the less reliable your signal will be.
To top it off, when the weakened cell signal finally gets to you, unless you’re outdoors it has to pass through still more obstacles – the concrete, brick, glass and metal of your home or workplace, or the metal and tinted glass of your vehicle – just to get to your phone.
And then what happens next? Dropped calls, slow uploads and downloads, poor quality audio and no-signal dead zones.
A weBoost AT&T booster can help
An AT&T cell phone signal booster from weBoost improves coverage by collecting the AT&T signal outside, amplifying it, and making it available inside your home, office or vehicle for cell devices to use. However, calling a weBoost product an “AT&T cell phone signal booster” is actually a misnomer, because weBoost products are carrier agnostic, meaning they’ll work for any U.S. or Canadian carrier – not just AT&T.
A weBoost cell signal booster uses an antenna to pick up weak signals from the cell tower. It then boosts the strength of those signals and redistributes the boosted signals inside your home, office or vehicle for any cellular-enabled device to use. To send boosted signals back to the AT&T tower, that process gets repeated in reverse order.
How an AT&T microcell works
On the other hand, the AT&T Microcell works in a completely different way. Unlike the weBoost signal booster, the AT&T Microcell acts like a mini AT&T-specific cell tower creating a local signal inside your home or office (it doesn’t work in vehicles).
AT&T Microcells require a broadband Internet connection, and they use your WiFi bandwidth. They compete for bandwidth with any other online use, including streaming video services like Netflix.
In contrast, AT&T cell signal boosters don’t need an Internet connection because they work with existing cell signals. weBoost cell boosters are certified by the FCC and approved by AT&T for use on its network, but because they’re carrier agnostic, they’ll work for all cell devices on other networks, too (T-Mobile, Verizon and others). That capability to work with all North American cell service providers is a major advantage over the AT&T Microcell, which improves coverage only for AT&T customers.
Recommended AT&T cell signal boosters
For home, office, or other indoor space
Home MultiRoom – Home cell phone booster for medium-sized homes.
weBoost Installed | Home Complete – weBoost’s most powerful home booster. Installation Included.
weBoost cell phone boosters for AT&T boost data and voice all the way up to 5G. You’ll get fewer lost connections, faster downloads and up to two more hours of talk time on one battery charge.
