Prairie Hills Wireless, Mimosa Align to Deliver Fiber-Fast Wireless Broadband

Mimosa Networks, a global enabler of 5G Fixed wireless solutions, and Prairie Hills Wireless, a Nebraska-based wireless internet service provider (WISP), have announced that the companies’ longstanding partnership has propelled Prairie Hills Wireless to a milestone of over 1,200 residential and business customers receiving fiber-fast broadband services.

Founded in 2013, Prairie Hills decided to answer the challenge to provide a compelling broadband experience in suburban Ravenna, Nebraska. Despite the generally rural environment, the competition was intense with two established national carriers — one a traditional large telco and the other a national cable operator — and three WISPs already providing service in the area. Ultimately, Prairie Hills founder Kent Urwiller knew that service and speed would differentiate them against the competition, and early on switched to Mimosa.

“The decision to deploy Mimosa was an easy one. We are thrilled with the success that we have seen against some very stiff competition, which includes some very large, nationally-known carriers,” said Urwiller. “We also knew that if we could establish ourselves and become the responsive incumbent, then it would be very difficult for a second provider to come in behind us.”

Prior to partnering with Mimosa, spectrum capacity challenges introduced by interference from its own radios, as well as those of nearby competitors, made scaling the business difficult. In the end, Urwiller deployed two types of 5G Fixed Wireless architectures, namely the Mimosa 5G MicroPoP architecture for urban-suburban locations and the Mimosa 5G GigaPoP architecture for rural locations.

In both architectures, Urwiller leveraged the entire Mimosa ecosystem to build out the network. Deploying the unique frequency reuse technologies in Mimosa’s unlicensed B5/B5c backhaul radios and moving traffic off of towers and into neighborhoods with Mimosa A5/A5c access points and C5/C5c client devices boosted subscriber speeds instantly – up to 300 Mbps for business customers and up to 150 Mbps for residential customers. Subscribers typically accustomed to seeing an average of just 5 Mbps were blown away with the level of service that they received from Prairie Hills, in record time after their initial request for service.

Urwiller’s network is fully monitored and managed via the Mimosa Cloud where real-time performance and comprehensive reports allow Prairie Hills to proactively respond to issues before they happen. According to Urwiller, “The historical statistics provided by the Mimosa Cloud are critical when trying to identify interference and traffic consumption, and the comprehensive and detailed performance parameters make managing the network simple.”

Just four years later, Prairie Hills now serves over 70% of the town of Ravenna, and covers an area of about 1,300 square miles. Prairie Hills is also the backup provider for Ravenna schools, supplying the local K-12 school with a 500 Mbps link for educational traffic, as well as providing a backup connection for the school’s core fiber network.

“There is no question that Mimosa’s wireless broadband solutions cost-effectively helped accelerate our deployment plans and success,” said Urwiller. “Mimosa’s innovative sync technology, together with the fastest available radio speeds, high-order MIMO and beamforming capabilities, make it easier than ever to deploy fiber-fast speeds as a high-quality service.”

John Colvin, SVP of Global Field Operations at Mimosa, is also thrilled with the ongoing partnership. “We have been honored to work so closely with Prairie Hills to help them accelerate and successfully deliver on their business plans in their service area. Mimosa solutions perfectly support Prairie Hills’ goals to aggressively plan, build, scale and maintain its broadband network and has changed the game for an upstart player in this market,” said Colvin.

Colvin continued and underscored, “We at Mimosa are excited to support Prairie Hills and other service providers as they build carrier-class Fixed wireless networks that compete and win against even the largest incumbent service providers. Our ultimate goal is to continue to help our customers build and scale networks that deliver the ultimate broadband experience to their subscribers.”