I have been a Verizon customer for years and was extremely weary about ATT since I didn't know anyone with their service local. I finaly made the plunge and switched over and got two Lumia 920s, one for me and one for my girlfriend. We get them home and... we have absolutely no service at our house or even on our property at all. The signal is totally gone as you turn on to our street. Now this wasn't actually that different from Verizon, who also had no service at my house. I was used to this, but my girlfriend wasn't. She had US Cellular previously and always had service at the house and found it unacceptable to have no service at home. We were considering returning the phones but she tried calling ATT to see what they said. They had us restart the phones while parked under an ATT tower with full signal and various other things to try and update the tower list in the SIM cards. Nothing worked. As it stood we were getting maybe 4 hours from 100% to dead with our phones since they were always at no signal and had the amplifiers on the radios cranked trying to talk to the tower.
After one final call to ATT they surprisingly offered us a 3G Microcell. There was a bit of a mishap with the CSR and they initially told us it would be free and credited us 125$. They told me to go to the local ATT store and buy one and we'd all be square. It ended up that the Microcell was 200$ and that CSR had mistakenly said it was free rather than heavily subsidized. We called back and they saw the notes in our file that the rep had said it would be "Free" and credited us an additional 75$.
Anyhow, we got it home, got it hooked up. We didn't put it 3ft from a window as the instructions dictated so it did take it a little while to get a GPS lock but once it did we were up and running. Full five bars "4G" through the whole house and all around the house it doesn't drop below three bars. The phones actually say on them too Connected to Microcell when you go to the network settings screen. What's interesting is the range on it is pretty high. Even a block or two away we still connect to the tower rather than the main network.
Now the whole reason I made this post: We went from about 4 hours battery life to a little over a day. This is with pretty heavy use too, watching a good amount of YouTube videos and streaming music from Grooverooster (heh) for a few hours. Yesterday when I went to bed I had 38% battery left and had the phone off the charger for 18 hours. Having a poor cellular connection has a tremendous impact on your battery life because the cellular radio has to draw so much more power to connect.
Anyhow, I don't know that ATT will be offering anyone else subsidies on the tower, but it's worth a shot if you have terrible signal at home. We also saw the towers being sold on Ebay and the like for pretty cheap and I'd say the thing is really worth it. We've been so surprised by how well it worked. It does require high speed internet at home but I don't think that's unreasonable. We're really glad we got it and can keep the ATT service and I thought I'd suggest it since I see so many posts about the Lumia's terrible battery life. Some of the problems may be unrelated but there may be a few people out there with no or poor signal at home and their Lumia could do much better with a better signal.
After one final call to ATT they surprisingly offered us a 3G Microcell. There was a bit of a mishap with the CSR and they initially told us it would be free and credited us 125$. They told me to go to the local ATT store and buy one and we'd all be square. It ended up that the Microcell was 200$ and that CSR had mistakenly said it was free rather than heavily subsidized. We called back and they saw the notes in our file that the rep had said it would be "Free" and credited us an additional 75$.
Anyhow, we got it home, got it hooked up. We didn't put it 3ft from a window as the instructions dictated so it did take it a little while to get a GPS lock but once it did we were up and running. Full five bars "4G" through the whole house and all around the house it doesn't drop below three bars. The phones actually say on them too Connected to Microcell when you go to the network settings screen. What's interesting is the range on it is pretty high. Even a block or two away we still connect to the tower rather than the main network.
Now the whole reason I made this post: We went from about 4 hours battery life to a little over a day. This is with pretty heavy use too, watching a good amount of YouTube videos and streaming music from Grooverooster (heh) for a few hours. Yesterday when I went to bed I had 38% battery left and had the phone off the charger for 18 hours. Having a poor cellular connection has a tremendous impact on your battery life because the cellular radio has to draw so much more power to connect.
Anyhow, I don't know that ATT will be offering anyone else subsidies on the tower, but it's worth a shot if you have terrible signal at home. We also saw the towers being sold on Ebay and the like for pretty cheap and I'd say the thing is really worth it. We've been so surprised by how well it worked. It does require high speed internet at home but I don't think that's unreasonable. We're really glad we got it and can keep the ATT service and I thought I'd suggest it since I see so many posts about the Lumia's terrible battery life. Some of the problems may be unrelated but there may be a few people out there with no or poor signal at home and their Lumia could do much better with a better signal.
I too got a great deal on a microcell and have used it at my last two apartments. 
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