Mosaic Telecom plans femtocell deployment

Mosaic Telecom, a small Wisconsin-based carrier with ILEC, CLEC and cellular operations, is planning to deploy femtocells from Airvana by the end of the year to help provide better in-home cellular coverage to its customers.

Femtocells, essentially miniature wireless base stations, shift mobile traffic onto a landline broadband connection when customers use mobile devices inside their homes.

“In rural areas, all wireless operators have a difficult time penetrating homes, trees, all that kind of stuff,” said Rick Vergin, CEO of Mosaic. The carrier hopes femtocells will also help differentiate its offering in a market where AT&T and Verizon Wireless also sell service.

Mosaic Telecom, formerly known as Chibardun Telephone Cooperative, has been offering landline services for decades, adding 3G wireless services in the AWS band in November. Broadband service at rates of at least 10 Mb/s is available throughout Mosaic’s ILEC and CLEC territories. The company has been offering a discount of 25% discount on cell phone services to customers that purchase the service as part of a quadruple play that also includes landline voice, video and data.

“The quad play has been one of those things competitors can’t offer,” Vergin said.

Mosaic plans to subsidize part of the price of the femtocells, which will cost customers $49.95. There will also be a $9.95 monthly fee for femtocell service, which the carrier will waive for customers signing up for quad-play services.

Mosaic’s wireless coverage area encompasses its entire ILEC and CLEC territories as well as some territories where it does not offer wireline service. Cellular customers outside areas where Mosaic offers landline service will be able to use femtocells with another landline provider’s broadband connection.

Eventually Vergin hopes to use the femtocells to help support converged wireless and wireline offerings, but he said manufacturers’ efforts in that area have stalled. “Right now there’s not a lot that Verizon and AT&T have been doing, so there hasn’t been a lot of development toward that,” he said.

Underlying Mosaic’s femtocells will be networking equipment from Nokia Siemens Networks.