Im getting an extender sent to me and I’m curious about privacy. Im on the 50th floor in a densly packed highrise. Will other people be able to piggy back and use my internet bandwidth? Do the latest Verizon Network extenders allow for privacy settings that limit who can access the signal?
I want the luxury of a robust signal, but if it’s at the cost of slowing down my fios speed, and it has questionable privacy features, Im not sure it’s worth it.
I have one of the 4G/LTE Verizon Network Extenders, and yes, it’s open, unmanaged. And uses your internet, not a lot, but some. I was seeing people in environments like yours saying that their neighbors would max out their extender, so they didn’t get to use it as often as they liked. For me, I found that wi-fi calling worked as well or better than the Extender, anyways. So the Extender is sitting on the shelf :-).
https://www.verizon.com/support/4g-lte-network-extender-faqs/
If you have FiOS why don’t you just use wifi calling? Especially if you’re worried about sharing your extender signal.
I have one, and I really wouldn’t worry even with it being open. The slice of band 13 it will broadcast is only going to use a maximum of ~80mb/20mb, which you should barely notice on your fiber connection.
The range on them is honestly pretty small as well, so the total area of people won’t be huge, even in a relatively dense area.
I love mine, I find that it works better than wifi calling even with a very solid wifi setup. The handoff from site-to-site is much smoother as well.
The extender sets up a VPN to Verizon’s own datacenter, somewhere. If you are on FIOS, I am guessing its Gigabit. You probably can’t even get full gigabit from any website already as it is, even if you wire in a desktop or laptop. The amount of bandwidth taken away by using the extender for calls is miniscule, less than 64kbit/s of regular VOIP.
If someone is using the LTE it provides for data, theyre going to get pretty crappy speeds and likely go back to their own wifi.
Privacy is only as much an issue as you would have on a public tower. Again, the VPN blocks any access to your own network, as it is the only path the extender data travels down.
I have the extender 2 and it’s open. Not sure about the latest extender. It’s only a 10MHz channel and that speed tops out around 50Mbps. You can change the power of the broadcasted signal. In an apartment you’d probably want to set it close to the lowest it can go to prevent too many neighbors from connecting. But even if they do I think the lowest Fios speed is 300 up and down now so 50Mbps isn’t gonna hurt much.
You can restrict the extender, but honestly it’s less than 10% of your FiOS bandwidth.
You can manage it via your VZW account.
Yep… that’s what my fear is.
Because Wi-Fi Calling is less reliable, especially in dense areas. OP probably has a ton of Wi-Fi interference around them, whereas their apartment having a weak LTE signal means they could use an Extender with very little interference.
I do use WIFI calling. Mostly without problem, but occasionally there will be some wonky calls.
I upgraded my wireless plan and the rep said they’d send me an extender for free. So I said, what the hell. But now that I look at the details, if in fact, I’ll be using my connection to feed bandwidth to other Verizon users, and it chops into my ul/dl speeds, Im not sure I want to go in this direction. But I cant find a definitive answer out there on the internets…thus why I’m asking here.
Thanks. I have it, so I’ll give it a try. Does the display on the unit show the number of users accessing the extender?
That hasn’t been my experience but ok. The extenders I’ve seen are set up to share with other Verizon users, but that may have changed since then (been a couple of years).
No, it’s not less reliable lol
The display does, but there is also a web ui that you can log into which will have the number of current devices, and keeps track of history for 24 hours so you can see over time
The only people who say Wi-Fi Calling is just as reliable as calls over VoLTE is people who never uses Wi-Fi Calling extensively. I have to deal with Wi-Fi Calling and it’s more unstable when receiving calls and when sending and especially receiving SMS/MMS compared to a Femtocell booster.
I have had horribly crappy wifi from one side of an apartment to another. It can very well be less reliable 
Licensed spectrum will nearly always be more reliable than unlicensed spectrum. That’s why carriers pay so much money for it.
I use Wi-Fi calling every day. Even though I have a pretty strong LTE signal, for whatever reason my phone seems to always default to using Wi-Fi calling at home.
I’ve had zero issues with it. It works identically to VoLTE to me, and can even hand off between them.
A network extender in an apartment building is an awful idea, since all of your neighbors can use it too, slowing down your Internet. It’s even worse if your ISP has a data cap, which many do.
LTE is slower, theoretically, than Wi-Fi.
Wi-Fi 6 reaches 1.2Gbps, Wi-Fi 6E reaches 2.4Gbps, and Wi-Fi 7 will at least double that again.
5GHz can be congested in MDUs, but I’ve never seen it so congested that it slowed to a crawl, and now we have 6GHz.
The network extender doesn’t even do carrier aggregation or anything like that. From what I’ve seen, the network extender often decides it only wants to broadcast B13 and nothing else.