According to Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator, some remote parts of the country especially in Wales and Scotland suffer from very poor mobile phone reception with 61 per cent of these areas unable to receive proper 3G coverage. This is essential for all the data that is downloaded from today’s phones – videos, football scores, share prices etc. Across the UK as a whole nearly one in five private users – 18 per cent – regularly found they were in a 'not-spot' at work or home, with 91 per cent of small businesses occasionally suffering from poor reception.

Poor signal coverage is not, of course, purely a rural problem. People in urban environments might expect to endure weak reception if they live in a basement or are inside unduly thick walls. However, this is only part of the story; the problem is that the network of masts which handle the nation’s mobile traffic send and receive signals within a fixed radius. Each one is at the centre of a circle and, as we all know, circles do not sit conveniently beside each other like squares and rectangles.

Try arranging 3 coffee cups so that they touch each other. No matter how hard you try, there will always be a gap between the 3 of them. In the world of mobile signals, it is this space that is likely to suffer from intermittent or weak coverage.

However, if you are unfortunate to live or work in any of these areas, help is now at hand with carriers virtually guaranteeing 5-bar signal strength around the clock. The white knight that is riding to the rescue is known as a femtocell and it’s basically a miniature mobile phone mast which comes in a box about the same size as a domestic router. It amplifies the mobile signal to 5 bar reception levels within a radius of 50 yards so it is ample for any domestic or small business environment.

The basic chip technology behind these small cells is largely British and the finished product is appropriately called Sure Signal. The box plugs into the user’s broadband hub via an Ethernet cable and comes at a one- off cost of £50.

This isn’t a bad investment considering that there is a guarantee customers will never again suffer the problems associated with a poor mobile signal.

Furthermore, it can be instructed to accommodate a total of 4 different numbers.

Femtocell users are also helping themselves and the wider mobile community by diverting traffic, which would normally travel over their network, down the internet instead. The rate at which data traffic is ballooning suggests that, at some point, consumers are going to have to pay more simply to create the infrastructure necessary to handle this boom. Therefore, the more data that can be carried over the net the better in terms of likely future mobile tariffs.

Let’s hope that ABI Research are right when they forecast that by the end of this year there will be 102 million users of femtocell products on 32 million access points worldwide.