Want a miniature cell phone tower in your home office? Sprint and Samsung have an interesting solution to your reception problems. Check our our Samsung Airave review to learn more.
Review summary of the Samsung Airave:
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 There is no doubt that femtocells will be an important part of the future of cellular networks, and the Samsung Airave on Sprint is a great first step. For users in remote cabins in the woods of Maine with absolutely no cell phone service in sight, the Airave will be a blessing, and will be worth the extra fees. But if you simply run out of bars in our kitchen, you might not be so willing to cough up the extra $5-25 per month, depending on your plan, to get what Sprint has been promising anyway: reliable service. The Airave won't make your phone faster or improve call quality, unless you were already having reception trouble, and then it will help your phone live up to its potential. Release: September 2008. Price: $100.
Pros: Improves, or even creates, reception for Sprint users. Wide range. Easy setup, if you can get a GPS signal.
Cons: Limited number of phones allowed at once. Pricey service plans required. Requires a GPS signal to work.
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Full review of the Samsung Airave:
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One of the biggest problems we encounter with cell phones is a lack of reception. If you've ever tried wandering around your house, or even hanging out your window, looking for those few extra bars, we hope you can relate. To that end, there are a few options that cell phone companies are trying to improve reception issues, and these usually come with some added value for the consumer as well.
On T-Mobile, customers can try the @Home service, with the accompanying HotSpot @Home phones, like the BlackBerry 8820. While we like the HotSpot @Home service, the unfortunate drawback is that the service requires a specially-enabled phone that can make calls over Wi-Fi networks.
The Samsung Airave, now available on Sprint, offers a better solution. It works with any Sprint phone and doesn't require any special radio or software inside. It improves reception for Sprint phones, even if you live in the middle of the desert, with no cell towers in range.
What is it?
The Samsung Airave is femtocell device. Basically, it's a miniature cell tower, the size of a wireless router, that connects to Sprint's network using your broadband network connection. You plug the Airave into your cable modem (or other Internet hookup), and it sends out a cellular signal, as if you had a cell tower on your bookshelf. This isn't a repeater, which amplifies an existing signal. The femtocell will work even if there is no Sprint network around, which makes it a nice option, if not the only option, for folks in remote areas.
In our experience, the Samsung Airave was very easy to install, with one major caveat. We plugged it into our network hub and the Airave did the rest. Initial setup took a while, maybe a half hour, but subsequent setups took less time, so we didn't mind.
The only problem with the Airave is that it uses a GPS radio to determine your location. We plugged in our Airave review unit in a home office buried deep in our house, near the attic, with no windows or sky in sight. In our first attempt, the Airave magically found our GPS location anyway, but on our second try the Airave couldn't complete its initialization process because it couldn't get a GPS lock. To help with this issue, the Samsung Airave comes with a GPS antenna with about 50 feet or so of cord attached. We strung the cord through the house to get it close to a window and then had no trouble finding a GPS signal. Unfortunately, our spouse was less than pleased with 50 feet of cord running through our upstairs floor.
Presumably, this GPS lock is a requirement to keep you from literally setting up your own Sprint network where none should be. For instance, we could buy the Airave in suburban New Jersey, then take the device to Western Europe, where there is no CDMA service, and operate our phones there to avoid international roaming concerns. The GPS prohibits this, and we certainly understand Sprint protecting its interests, but we wish there was an easier way. Couldn't the Airave log its IP address instead?
How well does it work?
The Samsung Airave works very well, but it isn't Superman. We got full reception on every Sprint phone we tried under the Airave's umbrella. Calls sounded very good, but not better than we've heard using the same phones in a spot with good Sprint reception. In other words, the Airave only improved reception, not call quality.
The Airave also didn't have an effect on data speeds, though it certainly helped us find a signal. In our tests with our Sprint Palm Treo 755p, using the phone as a tethered modem, we saw the same results as when the Airave was not running. Download speeds topped out at about 900Kbps, and uploads came in just over 70Kbps. Of course, our initial tests, without the Airave, failed frequently because we don't get very good EV-DO reception in our home office, and this is precisely the point of the femtocell.
Sprint limits the concurrent users on a Samsung Airave device to three phones. For our tests, we also tried making numerous calls at once from three different Sprint phones, our Treo, the Motorola RAZR VE20 and the Sanyo Katana Eclipse. We had no trouble making three calls simultaneously, conferencing the three phones together into one call. We also heard no static or reception-based calling problems.
Additionally, we turned on every wireless device we had to see if they would interfere with the Airave's service. We started a wireless network backup over our Wi-Fi 802.11n router, used our 2.4 GHz cordless phone and a stereo Bluetooth speakerphone. We've had intereference issues with our cordless phone and our Wi-Fi in the past, and we were pleased that the Samsung Airave didn't experience any trouble while all of this was going on (though we did hear some popcorn popping in our kitchen).
The Airave didn't seem to work its magic on a Verizon Wireless phone we were testing, but this isn't really a complaint. In fact, if you don't want others to benefit from your Airave's signal, you can limit the phones that can use the device, and assign up to 50 phone numbers that the Airave will accept.
How much does it cost?
Here's where things get dicey. Frankly, we think the Airave should be free, or at least very inexpensive. After all, we're already paying for Sprint's wireless service, and if Sprint requires a femtocell device to deliver that service then it shouldn't be up to the customer to pay extra for it. Unfortunately, the Samsung Airave is quite pricey at $100 up front, with a $5 monthly fee for the privilege of using the device. For an extra $10/month, you can buy unlimited minutes for a phone that initiates a call under the Airave's reception, similar to T-Mobile's offering.
The unlimited plan is nice, but the $100 up front cost and monthly fee for the Samsung Airave are too much. At least on T-Mobile's HotSpot @Home plans, users also get the benefit of unlimited calls when they place the call from any Wi-Fi hotspot, including their home, office or local Starbucks. With the Samsung Airave, you only get the benefit when you are within the range of the device, and though the Airave claims a range of nearly a mile, that won't take us all the way to our office in the city.
Price and availability
The Samsung Airave is available now from Sprint for $100.
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