Sprint Nextel Corp. said it plans to give $100 pint-size cell towers to some mobile-phone customers to improve coverage, a move that may put pressure on other competitors to follow suit.
“In certain situations, where you have really bad coverage in your home, we will give it to you as a retention tool,” according to Paget Alves, Sprint business-markets group president.
AT&T said it has given away the towers, known as femtocells, to some customers to test pricing models. Verizon Wireless said it doesn’t offer them for free.
A femtocell, about the size of a computer modem, acts like a mobile-phone tower, carrying a wireless signal inside a building for improved reception. Carriers may benefit from femtocells because the devices route calls through home Internet connections, relieving congestion on the companies’ networks.
“It’s a really effective way to offload traffic from the network,” said Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York. “One of the real puzzles is why carriers haven’t subsidized femtocells in larger quantities.”
