Review: SureCall Fusion Install Cell Signal Booster

Dropped calls? Slow internet? Texts that go nowhere? Despite all the ads touting breathtaking bandwidth and uninterrupted coverage, the fact is that for many of us, cellular connections remain spotty. One website recently pegged the US 4G footprint of Verizon at 70 percent. I’m on the second-biggest carrier, AT&T, which has 68 percent of the country covered.

Ostensibly that includes my house, but you wouldn’t know it from the quality of service I normally get: invariably one or two bars on my phone, incoming calls that never ring but go straight to voicemail, and the frequent need to stand near a window to get better audio quality and avoid dropping the connection.

There’s long been a solution for this, which involves connecting your phone to your home broadband network and doing an end run on the cell tower. Femtocells like the $250 Verizon LTE Network Extender are still around to do the job, but AT&T discontinued its MicroCell in 2017 in favor of letting smart phones connect directly to Wi-Fi hot spots. It’s great in theory (and great when it’s working), but for me, the only thing less reliable than my cellular service is my Wi-Fi.

The good news is that another, potentially better solution exists, though it isn’t cheap: a signal booster that can do a brute-force amplification of your existing cellular signal. The concept is often vaguely linked with scammy, spammy products (back in the zeroes, a few unscrupulous companies sold bogus stickers for your phone that promised to boost your signal), but modern signal boosters are legit.

The signal booster is actually a pretty simple device. A large directional antenna is mounted outside and aimed toward the nearest cell phone tower. The outdoor antenna captures the cellular signal, amplifies it, and rebroadcasts it on an omnidirectional antenna inside the house. The system is bidirectional, boosting the signal both ways, and (most importantly) it’s carrier-agnostic, requiring no registration, management, or contract. Anyone within range of the booster—which is said to cover 4,000 square feet of space—can benefit from it, as long as their network has a tower somewhere in striking distance.

To test whether a signal booster would do me any good, SureCall offered to have one of its high-end boosters installed in my home. Previously the product was available as a DIY kit installed by a homeowner or (more likely) a contractor they hired. But SureCall has recently begun offering its Fusion Install system with a bundled professional installation, partnering with Dish subsidiary OnTech to do the setup. (Due to the semi-permanent nature of the installation, this system is unable to be returned after the completion of the review.)

The installation was scheduled about a week out, and a friendly technician arrived on time. He discussed the ideal placement of the gear with me, and it quickly became easy to see why using a pro is a much better idea than trying to do this yourself. While the system isn’t complex, consisting of just an antenna and an indoor antenna and amplifier, getting it all wired together was a messy job that involved snaking cable through crawl spaces and drilling a hole through an exterior wall. It’s clearly difficult to make all of this look good.

Ultimately, the installation took about an hour, after which I was left with a clean setup that situated the interior gear out of plain view and saw the exterior antenna mounted on a sturdy pole attached to the eaves of our roof. Then, once the gear was plugged in, it was done. There is nothing to configure or manage, and no app to install. If you want to turn it off, you simply unplug it from the power outlet.

So, how well does it work? Performance has been a bit of a mixed bag, but there are some clear benefits to using the SureCall booster. The OnTech installer showed me on his handheld frequency reader that my pre-booster AT&T coverage was actually better than I’d thought, reading -68 dBm before installation. That’s not great, but it’s not as tragic as my dropped calls would suggest. That said, after the install, my signal was clearly stronger, hitting -53 dBm, which represents a solid level of coverage. (When measuring cell signals, decibels are in the negative range, so the closer to zero—i.e., the higher—the better.)

Oddly, my phone didn’t seem to take as much notice. I had two bars before the install, and I’ve still got two bars afterward. (SureCall says these onscreen bars are fairly meaningless.) My download speeds have fluctuated quite a bit, but in the aggregate, they have not changed significantly. Sometimes they are up by as much as 50 percent versus boosterless tests; sometimes they are down by the same amount. It’s hard to read too much into those figures due to the overall fluctuation of my downstream data rates.

What has clearly been impacted for the better is my upload speed. My typical 1- to 2-Mbps upload rate without the booster has now jumped to as high as 6 Mbps, and that improvement has been consistent across my testing. Admittedly, upload speeds aren’t the most critical benchmark for most users, but I won’t complain about the upgrade.

Qualitatively, phone calls do sound better, and my phone tends to actually ring instead of sending callers directly to voicemail. I haven’t had to stand by the window to improve call quality, either. Are all of these benefits definitively tied to the SureCall booster? Because of the constantly shifting winds of wireless, even with rigorous testing it's hard to know exactly what impact the system is having. But there does appear to be some level of sustained benefit from it. If your signal is in worse shape than mine, your mileage will likely be more clearly improved.