AT&T Community Forums

MICROCELL HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED

As I mentioned back in October, and it bares repeating now, the MicroCell has reached its End Of Life as of Dec. 31st. AT&T has already stopped selling units online and the only place to find a new one from AT&T is at a corporate/retail store as long as inventory lasts. You may be able to find one on eBay but there are caveats to purchasing from there which are covered in my Tech Guide (see link in my sig line). AT&T claims that they will continue support thru a period of time next year but that is probably not true. Support will just try to get you to switch to WiFI-C (WiFi Calling) which does offer better call quality and reliability but you will still need a post paid AT&T cellular account, a phone that is capable of WiFi-C, and a service area that has been provisioned for HD Voice (which most areas should already be).

WiFi-C requires two of the same four ports that the MicroCell requires. Sometime next year AT&T will probably stop supporting/maintaining the two ports that the MicroCell uses and allocate those resources elsewhere, so even if your MicroCell continues to work in 2018, at some point in time it will cease to be able to reach the AT&T Mobility Servers, without notification, and there will be nothing that can be done.

Seriously plan on switching to a phone that is WiFi-C capable, purchase a cellular booster (CelFi or weBoost) or switch to a carrier that offers better coverage in your home.

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AT&T Cell Booster Technical Guide by OttoPylot

Cellular Booster Guide by OttoPylot

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*I am not an AT&T employee, and the views and opinions expressed on this forum are purely my own. Any product claim, statistic, quote, or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider, or party.

Responses

sandblaster

ACE - Expert

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64.7K Messages

6 years ago

@OttoPylot Have any idea how many microcells are out there? I never realized ports used by microcells were also used for WiFi-C. I was just wondering if that might be a factor in not supporting WiFi-C on prepaid. Would freeing up those ports used by microcells expand capacity for WiFi-C?

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OttoPylot

ACE - Expert

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24.2K Messages

6 years ago

@sandblaster - AT&T has never shared that info with me about how many MicroCell's are still in use but my guess is that it is in the thousands. AT&T should check on how many active MicroCell's there are and send out text messages notifying the users about the EOL. That would be the proper thing to do instead of leaving it up to Support or me.

WiFi-C, at least for iPhones, uses ports 500 UDP and 4500 UDP. The MicroCell, in addition to those two ports uses 123 UDP and 443 TCP. I don't know for sure if Android devices use 500/4500 or not. My guess is that they do so that all WiFi-C on AT&T's network has the same access to the Mobility Servers. I haven't been able to determine if AT&T has changed the port assignments or not now that WiFi-C has been active, at least for the iPhones, for over a year.

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Avedis53

Professor

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2.2K Messages

6 years ago

Some reports I've read indicate AT&T had 350,000 Mcells a few years ago.....more than the number of cell towers they have. How accurate that is today is anyone's guess, but I'd hazard to say that it is a lot more than thousands.

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