When we first moved to Valley Springs Verizon Wireless Services was had the best coverage. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean at our specific location in the hills.

The signal strength in the small town area has the strongest signal. The cellphone (iPhone 12 Max) will get the the full 4 bar LTE signal. Once you drive away from town the signal strength decreases rapidly. I guess this would be expected since the hills and mountains will have an effect with the transmission towers “line of sight”.

I know for a fact AT&T signal strength is much better than Verizons at our home location. I have another iPhone with AT&T as the carrier and it consistently has 3 bars. Switching our personal phones over to AT&T was not a desirable option.

After researching the possibility of a LTE Extender I decided to go with the model you would purchase at the Verizon Store. I found a reviews online and it seemed rather split in opinions. The folks that actually got it to work said it was fine and other said they couldn’t get it to work at all. I can see if you’re not a tech savvy person this may be challenge.

I consider myself very tech savvy and I had some difficulty. The issues I was having I thought it was on end. I thought my router firewall was blocking IP address from being reached, possibly the GPS signal wasn’t strong enough, I even thought the ethernet hub I was using wasn’t compatible since it was a special type that power PoP IP cameras.

There are a various steps the LTE Extender goes through to successfully establish connection and function as expected. If any of these steps does not complete your box is not going to work.

One step that I didn’t perform was to call customer technical support and activate / register the LTE Extender device. I would get an error “5A” connecting to the server using CMP. This error would repeat no matter how many times I tried restarting the Verizon Box.

Once I contacted Verizon technical support and they performed the registration on their end I was able to establish a connection once the boot process completed. The actual boot process is lengthy but my LTE Extender required a software update. Additional time and setup is needed.

All in all this product works great. I have a strong signal everywhere in my home and outside. One added plus is being able to use my Verizon cellphone reliably 100 feet away down the hill inside my shop.