

The rules enacted by the FCC in 2013 were meant to prevent this. It makes calls drop, and other people in the area lose service, potentially even knocking out a tower and the disruption of service for thousands.

But if a booster is too close to a cell tower, that excess noise can cause massive interference, since it’s been amplified thousands of times. Signal boosters amplify this thermal noise and if they are tuned correctly and far enough away from a tower, it is not an issue. The bigger issue for carriers is thermal noise, a byproduct the boosters give off. If the two ends of the device, the receiving antenna, and the broadcast antenna aren’t far enough apart, they can get into a feedback loop, like what happens when a microphone gets too close to a speaker, which causes the booster to malfunction. If we can save some money, we’re all for it but at what cost? What is the downside to this seemingly fiscally frugal approach? The illegal or out of date amplifiers can cause two types of problems. So what? You may be asking and we get it. The only problem is when it comes to boosters, these systems are not always compliant. Far be it from us to downplay or disparage the benefit of such marketplaces, heck by all means we take advantage of them ourselves when it comes to buying office supplies or personal items. E-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay offer cheaper options. Doing so can get expensive, and we’ve seen it firsthand with many FCC-authorized boosters increasing in price over the years, some costing thousands or even ten-thousands of dollars. Today, all consumer signal boosters sold and marketed in the United States must meet the agency’s strict technical standards. That’s why the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began regulating the devices back in 2013. Given our years of experience, we know all too well that boosters can also have a dark side: If misconfigured or poorly manufactured, they can knock out service for everyone who happens to be nearby. In rural areas with poor cell coverage, or in buildings where signals have trouble penetrating, they can be real lifesavers, providing reliable access to communication networks and emergency services. When properly installed in a home or office, they can amplify one signal bar into five. In fact, some older devices are even more powerful than the ones we see today, but we’ll get to that a little later. It is certainly true that cell signal boosters are powerful devices. We’ve seen the inception of Booster systems and amplifiers in fact, we have quite the museum collection of historical pieces and the stories to go along with! Let us know if you are or know of any interested curators. As you may already know, CellTeks has been in the signal booster industry for decades.
