Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Why do we ask for site surveys? sells high gain cellular antennas and signal amplifiers to mobile broadband customers who are unhappy with the speeds they get from their cellular modems.

The primary reason for the poor performance is that where they want to use their mobile broadband service, they suffer from weak cellular reception. When it comes to mobile broadband data, weak signal really affects the download and upload speeds that a modem can deliver.

When these customers call us asking for recommended solutions we typically point them to an article we wrote called "Will an antenna help me?"

The article explains how to do a "local site survey" to measure and record signal strength (as RSSI) and throughput (speeds measured using a site like at various locations both indoors and around their home or office.

When the "site survey" process is explained to some folks, they question why they need to go through all that when all they want to do is just want to buy an antenna.

Our answer is that some competitors would gladly just sell them something and tell the customer to "Buy It And Try It"... but that's not how prefers to operate.

We prefer that our customers experience the difference in speeds they can achieve with better signal, and a site survey will help them do just that.

You see, the gear we sell is designed to improve upon the signal reception, which in turn should result in better speeds... but it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes, customers are near a problematic cell tower, or in an area that is "oversold" by a carrier resulting in too many users on a cell tower. If that's the case, improving signal to that celltower may not result in any better performance ... and if that customer just "buys and tries" whatever someone wants to sell and finds no difference in the speed, who are they going to blame? The folks who sold it to them -- the competitor who doesn't make the same effort to educate customers like we do.

A site survey can show a customer what speeds to expect from better signal before a purchase, before a time-consuming installation, and before frustration and anger. prides itself in its reputation for providing exceptional pre- and post-sales customer support, and we hate it when a customer has to return products that did not provide the results the customer was hoping for.

That's why we ask customers to take the time to do a site survey, so we can better judge what equipment will bring them (and us) the satisfaction they want.