Vodafone Begins UK Rural Rollout of New Indoor 3G Mobile Signal Boost

Mobile operator Vodafone has today enabled the first community hub to receive an indoor 3G signal boost via their new Community Indoor Sure Signal (CISS) programme, which eventually hopes to improve the indoor mobile signals for 100 rural community hubs across the United Kingdom.

Under the scheme, which was first announced in July 2016 (here), a community hub (e.g. village pub or hall) will be sent one of Vodafone’s femtocell based Sure Signal+ (v2.2) devices. The new kit is then plugged into a fixed line broadband router, which enables it to harness the Internet connection in order to boost a 3G mobile signal for up to 50 metres around the property via the 2100MHz band.

The CISS approach builds off Vodafone’s existing Rural Open Sure Signal (ROSS) technology, which is being used to expand outdoor 3G network coverage across almost 84 isolated rural communities out of the 100 originally targeted. However ROSS was never very good at tackling indoor coverage and that’s where CISS comes into play.

Vodafone began accepting applications for community hubs last year and this process completed in September 2016. Today the first community hub to officially benefit is the Wortwell Bell Inn in Harleston (South Norfolk), although the setup has also been piloted at The Bear and Ragged Staff pub in Bransford (Worcester).

Jorge Fernandes, CTO of Vodafone UK, said:

“Community hubs, like pubs and village halls, across the UK play an important part in rural life and supporting the local economy. We want to ensure all our customers can enjoy the benefits of mobile connectivity wherever they are but appreciate there are some communities which will take longer to get to using traditional methods. We remain committed to innovative programmes, like ROSS and CISS, which help bring coverage to communities who need it.”

We should point out that CISS isn’t a particularly new approach as Vodafone has been selling Sure Signal devices to individual customers for quite a few years now. On top of that the community hub also requires a 4Mbps (2Mbps upload) capable fixed line broadband connection in order to work, which can be a problem in some areas where local connectivity is stuck in the slow lane.

On top of that you lose some of your connection speed in order to boost the 3G signal, which can be counter-productive if you previously used it to help support a public WiFi network or need the full speed for yourself. However some community hubs do benefit from faster connections and so this may be a useful service for those locations. Vodafone are also tentatively looking at expanding CISS to support 4G.