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Google Confirms Intent To Bid for 700MHz Spectrum
narramissic writes "Today Google put an end to the 'will they or won't they' debate with the announcement that the company intends to join in the bidding for 700MHz wireless spectrum in late January. 'We believe it's important to put our money where our principles are,' Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman and CEO, said in a statement. 'Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today's wireless world. No matter which bidder ultimately prevails, the real winners of this auction are American consumers who likely will see more choices than ever before in how they access the Internet.'"
...put an end to the 'will they or won't they' debate...
I never saw any sound evidence put forth that they wouldn't bid on this spectrum. As far as I was concerned this was a sure thing. Here's to hoping they win the auction!
I got a catholic block.
Strike while the iron is hot.
Google is on fire now, and as far as the market is concerned, can do no wrong. There will not be any future time where Google will be able to put together the sort of money needed to make these types of investments.
But that doesn't mean they will succeed in their wireless plans. As cool as they are, the wireless spectrum is a well established area with not only wireless carriers already bumping against each other for more elbow room but also broadcast radio and television conglomerates. Google can't play David successfully forever. They may have done a great job on the web where they led the technology, but here they will be following and a look at their online office suite, it is clear that they are poor followers.
It honestly depends on your definition of good and evil. They are a corporation founded upon bringing information to you be it ads or otherwise. They make their money off of insane amounts of ad revenue so in that sense they're "bad," but at the same time, they do make very sure to only bring things to you that you may be interested in and this careful filtering is "good."
It really just comes down to viewpoint. If you like finding things for yourself and don't want anyone telling you anything about where and how to spend your money then google is "evil." If you like having them point out deals and lead you to companies that are selling what you want (similar to an errand boy doing some of your shopping and looking around for you) then they're "good."
The only potentially frightening thing about google is the power they have if some of their information gets into the wrong hands (i.e. Government Subpoena).
The original generic sig.
What does Google plan to do with this spectrum? Is the end result for themselves or for consumers? If consumers, will it be ad based, or cheap and flooded with Google-ads? And if free to connect, how much will the hardware cost? Or, does Google plan to enter the cellphone market like every other provider, screwing users with 3 year contracts?
Google is not a hardware company. They should stick to what they are good at, which is being an ad distributer. I believe this is a big mistake they are making.
Except unlike most advertising companies, Google provides us with a service that is extremely useful. Sure, advertising is how they make their money, but that's how they keep the service they provide for us free. It's like broadcast television. They provide us with entertainment with the catch that there will be a few commercials here and there. Except with Google we don't have 30 second annoyances which take up the whole screen and don't allow us to view anything else. Google has pleasant little text ads on the side. That's why everyone loves them.
The key here is that they have got the wireless companies where they want them even if they don't win the auction. If the other companies knew that Google was not going to bid on it then they would just wait for it expired and be put up without the requirements. Now Google assures themselves an open network even if they don't win because the other companies have to follow the requirements.
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert
This isn't really about winning contracts, this is an auction, just as it was for PCS and AWS. PCS was an unmitigated disaster precisely because the entire thing was "highest bidder wins". Swathes of spectrum were unused as they were owned by speculators, and no operators were ever able, in practice, to purchase spectrum in every market. The notion that the intent was to create usable mobile phone networks was simply not considered by the FCC, who were only interested in raising a huge amount of money, and used "free market" justifications for the ensuing chaos.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Seriously, you're going to try to reduce Google to this level?
First and foremost, they provide you with the best search results, and have done so for years, for free.
They provide an outstanding email system, with now 5GB of free space and growing, for free.
They provide one of the most amazing mapping systems ever, continually adding new, cutting edge features, for free, both on the web, on your phone and in Google Earth.
They provide office collaboration online apps in Google Docs (which I use almost every day with friends spread out across the globe), for free.
They provide a really great photo organizing software (Picasa) and even some space on their site to upload pictures to, for free.
They provide a place to share gigabytes of video with everyone on earth in Google Video and YouTube, for free.
And we're merely scratching the surface.
And you're going to try and reduce them to the level of "Madison Avenue hucksters"?
Oh, that's right, they developed a cutting edge advertising system that provides context-sensitive, extremely-low-key advertisements in an un-annoying way, and a backend system that allows any size company to competitively bid for ad placement in this system at a reasonable rate.
You're right, Google sucks, man! Fight the power!
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
I didn't read about this (doesn't really concern me here in Europe).
As far as I understand, the auction is for 22MHz channels on the 700MHz band.
So they will be selling a channel from 700MHz to 722MHz, then 723MHz to 745MHz and so forth (and back).
I don't know how many channels are for sale and how much should be the guard band (the gap between channels) for these frequencies (don't feel like googling).
But I guess this is pretty much enough to understand...
Except that Google has decided to be bound not just to the laws of the countries they operate in, but have also claimed and I believe attempted to operate to a higher standard. At least in some matters they ask themselves not only is something legal, but is it right.
They still make me nervous, but I believe they do a better job of being ethical than some of the other guys.
I'm not opposed to companies making money by any means, but let's at least be honest with ourselves that Google isn't doing this out of a sense of altruism.
If by making a sick amount of profit they can build and deploy a wireless service that is better, cheaper, and faster than any available from current suppliers - more power to them.
Again, most of this is from dubiously trustworthy news outlets, [citation needed] so to speak.
The good news is that Google will make all cellphones better if they get into the race. The reason? Openness. From the beginning of time it seems the US carriers have locked down there phones so you can't do things like load MP3 songs and java applets to them without buying them online. They have the java networking locked down so you cannot connect to everything or use regular sockets (IE not web).
Right now companies like Verizon are panicking and racing to open there networks (IE http://www.phonescoop.com/news/item.php?n=2552), if google gets spectrum it will be good for all because google will have lots of cool applications and programs on there phones, and the other carriers to even compete will have to open up there phones for development to everyone.
Also the 700mhz spectrum is a great place to be for a new network as you can get better coverage and need less cell density when your starting out.
-M
And who in the end pays that price in some form or another? Yup, us.
It's a private sector company. The only way they get your money is if they use said spectrum with some amazingly cool widget or service that you're willing to spring for it. Otherwise they lose out and that's just tough. So they're really motivated to make such widgets and services that will bring you enough benefit that you'll pay the premium. So *IF* you pay for it, it'll be a good thing.
Let me sum up the business plan of Google, cause it's a variation of one that has been used for hundreds (maybe thousands) of years:
1. Buy large tract of undeveloped land in an area that is incredibly congested.
2. Invite people to propose ideas for the use of said land.
3. Charge the people with the best ideas for the priviledge of using the land.
4. Let idea people build on the land, charge for it.
5. Charge people who use the new infrastructure on the land.
6. When the idea gets old, evict the old idea people, and start over at Step 2.
Now, replace "land" with "Spectrum". Welcome to Money City, now owned by Google.
~Sticky
/Don't have a business plan? COME ON!!
//Seriously, DUH!
Yeah but... I'm not a huge fan of Google either, amazing technologies or not. First of all, their technologies aren't as effective in today's internet world as they were when they first started -- I'm spending more and more time weeding through meaningless results for things and my queries have only gotten more specific so I'd expect pretty accurate matches -- so I would say they should focus on quality and not quantity. In other words, make your search better. I'd love to take their advice and share their ideas about several ways they could do this, but they're cutesy little "help us improve" link they have takes me to a list of jobs that I'm not qualified for because I don't have a CS degree, relegating me to gripe about their problems in some Slashdot forum instead. Secondly, Google wants us to buy into the fact that even though they have the ability to abuse our information, that they won't because they adhere to some kind of moral principal. If that was really the case it seems they wouldn't store your search history indefinitely. They don't really need more than some simple information to effectively target ads to you, in other words they could purge your searches and retain only what they need to to target ads. But they don't. Even Microsoft and Yahoo purge their search histories more frequently. From what I understand, Google reserves the right to use this information to "profile" its users in the future. To paraphrase something I heard once from someone who works at EFF.org, your Google history is the closest thing in the digital world to what's in your brain. Google makes money off selling targeted ads. They are very good at it, look at their stock. This is how they can also try to pull off a bid on a part of a wireless spectrum valued as highly as $10 Billion. But each one of those dollars was made by showing you, albeit only slightly annoying, ads in response to your search queries. The difference between Google and bulk spammers is that Google actually provides a useful service. But as the quality of their search results deteriorates, hopefully the world will realize that they've spread themselves too thin and either force them to improve, or move onto someone else. Long live creative destruction. Google, I'll keep using your service if it's good. But if it starts to suck, I'll move on.
corporations are bad! money is bad! spectrum is bad! it's nice to know there are so many self-employed philanthropists on /. would you guys get together in utopia and bid on this for the benefit of all mankind? please?
dunno, i'm willing to give google a chance on this one. there's NO WAY they can be as inept, immoral, incompetent and possibly inbred as the rest of the mobile carriers in the U.S.