Verizon calls them ‘network extenders’ and they started working again once Verizon bought Golden State. I bought mine from Verizon and it works great! So nice to have good cell reception again.
I believe that now that Verizon has taken over the old Golden State Cellular territory, verizon microcells will work in our area. A rental house down the street where our daughter stayed a while back had one and it worked great.
We dumped our data plan in favor of regular old flip phones. Now we can make calls in several areas that we couldn’t make with our iPhones and a data plan.
One possibility is that a next door neighbor had a microcell. I know one of the cabins in our area has one. Our daughter stayed there once and I was amazed to find I had 4 bars while visiting until I noticed the verizon microcell.