Getting a weak cellular signal in your tiny home, work shed, or studio apartment? You need a signal booster. The weBoost Home Studio ($349.99) is the least expensive option in Wilson's weBoost home line, with simpler installation and smaller indoor hardware than the manufacturer's other models. Our Editors' Choice in this price range remains the SureCall Flare 3.0 ($379.99), which covers two to three rooms, but the Home Studio is a very suitable boosting solution for a smaller space.
Weak Signal? How About a Boost?
Cellular boosters use large antennas and powered amplifiers to make whispered cell signals louder. While they can't conjure signal out of thin air, they can stretch the radius of a cell by the critical distance you may need for decent coverage inside your home. If you have signal outside your house but not inside, for example, they're terrific.
Wilson Electronics' weBoost line ranges from this single-room device up to a $1,200, professionally installed whole-home solution. It's one of four reputable home booster brands sold in the US, along with Cel-Fi, HiBoost, and SureCall. All of them boost 3G and 4G signals on popular frequency bands for all the major US carriers, along with extremely limited 5G boosting. The fastest 5G bands, and T-Mobile's rural band 71, can't currently be boosted by personal-scale devices; if that's something you really need, you'll have to shell out for a commercial booster.
Rather than a three-piece kit with a separate outdoor antenna, booster, and emitter, this is a two-piece system with a large, directional outdoor antenna and a small black box that goes inside the house with an omnidirectional antenna (like the one on your Wi-Fi router) screwed onto it. The petite indoor unit is a large part of the appeal here: It's a little black 6.1-by-3.9-inch box that's easy to place and forget about.
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The Home Studio indoor unit is small enough to be placed just about anywhere.
Simple Setup
If you've ever tried to build a piece of flatpack furniture, you'll appreciate the care with which the Home Studio is packaged. Each piece of equipment gets its own little cardboard compartment within the box, and the small hardware—all nuts and bolts, no screws—is sorted into individual bags. It's all clearly designed to give a friendly first impression.
The kit comes with everything you need to install the booster.
The biggest thing in the box is the directional antenna, a large wedge of smooth, white plastic. An L-shaped metal bracket quickly attaches to it with two small bolts. This bracket can be attached directly to the side or roof of your house, but a better option is to find a nearby vertical pole. Two U-shaped mounts thread through the bracket and let you rotate the antenna a full 360 degrees in search of a signal to amplify. All the nuts and coaxial connections are tightened by hand. No tools are required.
The directional antenna is both a reason to get this booster and a reason you might not want to. Directional antennas are capable of better signal reception than smaller indoor or omnidirectional antennas, but they need to be mounted properly outdoors and pointed in the right direction. A unit like Surecall's EZ-4G or the Cel-Fi DUO+ doesn't need to be externally mounted, but it probably won't capture weak signals as well.
The directional antenna works best on a rooftop.
A short coaxial cable extends from the outdoor antenna. Two 30-foot rolls of cable, joined by a small connector, link this cable to the indoor booster, a small black rectangle with five LEDs on top. The LEDs show whether boosting is active on each of five bands: 2, 4, 5, 12, and 13. The indoor booster is painless to set up: Just screw in the small omnidirectional antenna and plug in the power supply.
Unfortunately, the included coaxial cables aren't flat, so attempting to run them under a door or window is frustrating. Unless you plan to drill a hole for the cable to run through, you should invest in some flat coaxial cable—20 feet will cost you about $20.
Following the installation guide's instructions, we first chose a room that needed its signal boosted. That meant testing signal throughout the house, so we downloaded the third-party NetMonitor app onto our Samsung Galaxy S20. SureCall and weBoost don't offer any built-in signal strength indicators or a custom app to help you set up their devices. Cel-Fi's boosters come with an app, and HiBoost's even have an on-screen display, but those units are more expensive or clunkier than the sleek little Home Studio.
After deciding to put the indoor unit in the kitchen, we then needed to mount the external antenna. The house where we tested is built onto a hillside that slopes upwards to the south, so we put the external antenna on the back deck on the south side of the house, directly behind the kitchen. By attaching the antenna to the pole of a patio umbrella, we gave it about 20 more feet of elevation than would have been possible on the north side of the house. And with a signal this weak, every bit of elevation counts.
Finding an unobtrusive outdoor location for the large directional antenna can be a challenge.
We ran one 30-foot cable into the house, attached it to the interior antenna, and plugged in the power supply. The indicator LEDs turned red. We checked the helpful troubleshooting section of the installation guide and determined that the two antennas were too close together and feeding back to each other in a loop. With any signal booster, you need to put the indoor unit as far from the outdoor antenna as possible. (It would be nice if the Home Studio's installation instructions mentioned this.)
The indoor antenna is much easier to move than the outdoor one, so we attached the second coaxial cable and moved the indoor antenna to the living room. All the lights turned a happy green.
Location-Dependent Performance
The company says this is a 60dB booster that handles bands 2/4/5/12/13/17/25. Our test location this time showed a key problem with using boosters on T-Mobile. If your location depends on band 71, T-Mobile's most rural coverage band, boosters don't help. Our location was surrounded by four cell sites: two with bands 2 and 12, and two with bands 12 and 71.
This map from CellMapper.net shows the area around our test home. The region relies on band 71, which no retail booster covers.
Aiming the antenna at a nearer tower with bands 12/71 resulted in a relatively small boost in apparent signal, but a decent boost in data transfer speeds. Aiming it at the band 2/12 tower resulted in a much greater apparent signal boost, but, oddly, the same data transfer performance.
Teasing out why was a little tricky, but here goes. When connected to the band 12/71 tower, the phone used 15MHz of total spectrum (10MHz on band 12 and 5MHz on band 71). Band 71 was the phone's "primary" band, but only band 12 was being boosted. The phone showed continued weak signal on the primary band, 71, but had better performance because of the boosted secondary band, 12.
Pointing the antenna at the other tower, the phone captured only 5MHz of band 2 signal, which it didn’t see at all without the booster. However, the 5MHz of boosted band 2 had the same performance as the 15MHz of bands 12 and 71.
The moral of this story is that this remote mountain home probably could have used a more powerful booster aimed at the band 2 tower.
Signal strength is measured in dBm, starting at -1 and dropping further into negative numbers as signal gets weaker. Without the booster, the signal strength in the house ranged from around -103dBm (tolerable) to -118dBm (barely there).
The booster gave a healthy 24dBm of signal improvement, from -105dBm to -81dBm, as long as we were right next to the indoor unit. Though signal strength declined quickly with distance, dropping to -95dBm in about 10 feet, data transfer speeds stayed stable when we stayed in the same room. The booster didn't help much with speeds in the next room, though it helped a lot in the basement immediately below the room where the booster was.
Sitting right next to the indoor unit will give you the biggest boost.
Speeds improved from 5.5Mbps down and 4.8Mbps up without the booster to 18.6Mbps down and 5.4Mbps up in the same room as the unit. We didn't see much improvement in uplink, which is a concern for people hoping that the Home Studio will fix their Zoom issues, but we're confident that's just an artifact of the network it was being tested against.
Just a Little Boost
The weBoost Home Studio does what it promises to do: It boosts cellular signal in a single room, pretty much on par with other commercial boosters, with a smaller indoor unit than the SureCall Flare 3.0 and less-involved setup than other weBoost products or competing brands. At $349.99, it's competitive with the Flare 3.0 and with HiBoost's Home 4K Smart Link, which is much bigger but also has much more indoor coverage.
If you're looking to outfit a larger house, consider the weBoost Home Multiroom ($549.99), which can use multiple indoor panels in different rooms. The Flare 3.0 is our Editors' Choice for a general-purpose small-home booster; it's capable of roughly the same amount of signal boosting, it's also a convenient two-piece unit, and its larger emitter showed more signal range throughout a home in our tests than the petite Home Studio's. But if you have a space like a shed, a tiny house, a studio apartment, or a parked RV—someplace where you can mount an external antenna and indoor space is at an absolute premium—the weBoost Home Studio is a good option.
Signal problems in your home may be caused by dense walls that also block Wi-Fi signals. If your computer is as signal-poor as your phone, check out our roundups of the best Wi-Fi signal boosters and range extenders.
The Link LonkApril 15, 2021 at 04:04AM
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weBoost Home Studio Review - PCMag
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