Google Wants To Be a Wireless Carrier

zacharye writes "Google has already conquered the software side of smartphones and now the technology giant is reportedly in talks to take over the air waves. A report on Thursday claims that Google has held talks with satellite television provider Dish Network regarding the possibility of a venture that would see Google launch its own cellular network and compete directly with the likes of Verizon and AT&T."

Comments

Shut up and take my money

[Anonymous Coward]

When the current crop of American wireless carriers look like a group of mustache-twirling Bond villains, it won't be hard for Google to come off as the better choice. At least they'll have an incentive to give you unlimited high speed data.

Too bad the coverage area will probably be tiny.

Re:Shut up and take my money

[somersault]

As long as it forces the other carriers to have a look at their rates, it's good. It probably won't affect me anytime soon seeing as I live in the UK (besides, my phone is a company phone anyway), but I'd like to see what kind of rates Google considers to be reasonable.

Re:Shut up and take my money

[History's Coming To]

If they follow their general model we'll probably be looking at something ad supported - in-browser, SMS ads, that sort of thing - to support "unlimited" data, and with the option to pay $5/month to remove them. If Google take this as a near-loss-leader then we could see a big shake up amongst providers, although I suspect we'll simply see a host of competitiveness lawsuits and the lawyers will be the only winners...again.

Re:Shut up and take my money

[BlueStrat]

When the current crop of American wireless carriers look like a group of mustache-twirling Bond villains, it won't be hard for Google to come off as the better choice. At least they'll have an incentive to give you unlimited high speed data.

Too bad the coverage area will probably be tiny.

You might get slightly better deals with Google, but the additional privacy/tracking data that Google (and the US government) will have on people...internet and phone/voice history, voice call recordings and internet browsing history, all that data from one convenient source...scares me.

I wish someone would write a credibly-strong voice/data encryption/scrambling smartphone app. They would probably have to develop/release/distribute it outside the US in a country unfriendly to the US, however, to avoid the long reach of the US government.

They wouldn't be happy that a large chunk of the domestic civilian signals surveillance data they planned to store in that mega-sized (and a mega-sized price tag) government data storage center they're building in Colorado became all but useless to them before they even cut the opening-day ribbon. That's one very large chunk of taxpayer money I wouldn't mind seeing turned into waste.

Strat

Re:Shut up and take my money

[Anonymous Coward]

If they follow their general model we'll probably be looking at ...

If they follow their general model we'll probably be looking at Google tracking anything and everything your phone sends and receives, and then they'll send you ads. So, in the middle of texting back and forth to pick a time and place for dinner you'll get a Google sponsored text message telling you about a great restaurant in your area and they happen to take Google Wallet as a payment method.

Re:Shut up and take my money

[chill]

Uh, banging a porn star is easy, all it takes is money. Many of them have side jobs as escorts in Las Vegas.

You DO realize porn stars are essentially prostitutes with a camera crew, don't you?

Of course, they charge more than the $20 crack-hos you're used to so you'll need to have some serious income first. Stupid details.

Good

[dnahelicase]

Competition is nice, but I don't live in Seattle or Kansas City, so it probably won't affect me. ATT will probably just come up with a new plan where my family can share just a little bit less data for a little bit more money than I'm already paying.

Re:Technical Question

[kriebz]

No, SMS came from a GSM feature that sent data in tiny packets in the control channel phones used all the time for presense and syncronization. The bandwidth was always in constant use, so packing data into it didn't really cost anything. CDMA probably implements a similar feature that uses squat bandwidth.

Now, the weird thing is, carriers charge the same for SMS as MMS, at least in my experience, where MMS uses 3G to send potentially a lot of data.

Re:Technical Question

[YoopDaDum]

The pricing is not so much driven by the technology than by what operators can charge. It's particularly true for text, where the margin is really really huge and unrelated to technology. But as it's a geek site let's go over the tech now ;) All 3 use slightly different mechanisms.

Short messages (SMS, or text) piggy back over the signaling protocol.

With GSM and WCDMA 3G (3GPP standards), voice and data share the same radio network. But on the network side there are separate core networks for voice (CS domain, for Circuit Switched) and data (PS domain, for Packet Switched). In the CDMA world there are actually separate radio networks for voice (CDMA 1x) and data (EVDO). This is why you can't do both voice and data at the same time on most CDMA phones: it would require 2 radios, which adds cost and complexity. Whereas with 2G/3G, both goes over the same radio network so both can operate concurrently with a single radio.

Starting with 4G, or LTE in practice, there is still a single radio network as before but now the core (EPC, Evolved Packet Core) is also unified and built over IP. Voice over LTE (VoLTE) is not common yet but it's basically VoIP built on IMS. All is unified, but voice is of course prioritized over best effort data using QoS both in the RAN (radio access network) and EPC.