Saturday, November 11, 2006 - If you're looking to improve the cell phone reception inside your home or office building, Spotwave's Z1900 Indoor Wireless Coverage System can help.

The product is compatible with cell phones from Cingular, T-Mobile, and Sprint. Spotwave claims to give you "5 bars of reception" for your cell phone or PDA up to 2500 feet away.  But you must have at least two bars of reception outdoors for Spotwave to work indoors.  We decided to test Spotwave in a downtown El Paso office building where the coverage is limited at best, because of the large amount of concrete and steel that was used in the building. 

Spotwave consists of three pieces, the Network Access Unit which grabs the cell phone signal from outside, the Coverage Unit (indoor transmitter) that sends the boosted signal throughout your home or office, and the micro cable which connects the two.  We set up the Network Access Unit against an outside wall, but because we had the Spotwave system in an office and couldn't run the micro cable through the building, we had the Coverage Unit just a couple of feet away.

Then we took a cell phone on the T-Mobile network and walked through the offices to see if the reception was improved.  While we did not get the promised "5 bars of coverage" we did see some improvement.  On a 1-10 scale, I'd give Spotwave a "7".

Spotwave retails for $399.  Get more information at www.spotwave.com