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Google Plans Major Play In Wireless Partnering With Sprint and T-Mobile
MojoKid writes There's a new report suggesting Google is partnering with select wireless carriers to sell its own branded wireless voice and data plans directly to consumers. According to sources and the "three people with knowledge of the plans," Google will tap into networks belonging to Sprint and T-Mobile for its new service, buying wholesale access to mobile voice and data in order to make itself a virtual network operator. That might sound disappointing on the surface. Had Google struck a deal with Verizon and AT&T, or even just Verizon, the deal could potentially have more critical mass, with great coverage backed by a company like Google and its services. The former might be a winning combination but at least this is a start. The project will be known as "Nova," which is reportedly being led by Google's Nick Fox, a longtime executive with the company. Apparently Fox has been overseeing this for some time now, and it seems likely a launch will take place this year.
Those are the 5 questions any article is supposed to answer.
And it does not say why?
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Look for a trade - Google finances the expansion of their networks (both in terms of coverage and capacity) in return for a good deal on wireless services.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Maybe. The devil is in the details, and I'm looking forward to learning more about it. But Google has a shitload of money and they blow way too much on useless crap that no one wants like Google Glass and autonomous cars. They're launching fiber now here in Austin, giving Time Warner and AT&T some much-needed competition. Backing underdogs like Spring and T-Mobile makes me think Google may end up owning both. One thing Google does well is networking.
However, there is one caveat: will Google be sniffing all the traffic it sees on these newly-acquired traffic just to harvest it and sell to advertisers. THAT's where I draw the line. My ISP has only ONE JOB: connect me to the web without getting in the way. That's what I pay for and that's what I currently get.
They may be afraid of being made irrelevant by a deal like this, but they're much more afraid of being made irrelevant by a deal with their competitors. Imagine how different the market would be today if the original exclusive iPhone contract had been with someone other than AT&T.
Besides, one likely end scenario if this goes huge is that Google buys their partners.
If they want to let people bring their existing phones, supporting both networks greatly increases their audience. It can also make a big difference in coverage if you can roam across to one of the big networks.
This seems like particularly alarming news for Ting, which currently runs over Sprint's network, and is apparently getting ready to add T-Mobile.
I think Google only really cares about data. Perhaps the Google-branded service will be LTE-only, including voice over LTE. If so, then they don't really care about CDMA or GSM. They may even ignore voice and tell people to use the Google Hangouts dialer with Google Voice.
That would be a pretty reasonable strategy for Google, since they're certainly going to be mostly interested in the data side of things anyway.
Do you really want to give Google yet more access to your personal information / habits?
Based on all the wonderful services they provide for me with that information (like Google Now, automatic traffic notifications based on my traveled routes,etc), and the fact that I haven't seen any actual bad things from it, yes, yes I do.
The next thing you know, when you call Papa Johns for pizza you'll start seeing targeted ads for Dominos the next time you log on to the net on your PC.
The horrors.
There is a company called Ting and they already do this same thing with the same carriers.
It's Sprint and T-Mobile working with them: the distant third and fourth place competitors in a four-horse market. Any disruption in the market will hit the bigger two competitors—AT&T and Verizon—significantly harder, and with this deal, the bottom two have positioned themselves to gain from AT&T and Verizon's loss, even if that gain isn't as significant as it would be if they outright won those customers directly. Even the simple act of getting those customers away from AT&T and Verizon is a big win, since it means AT&T and Verizon would have lost the incumbent's advantage when those customers' contracts are up and they're looking around at their options.
Exactly. All that infrastructure build-out costs lots of money. You need subscribers to pay the rent on the cell site, you need coverage (cell sites) to get customers. It takes a lot of cash to bootstrap that. Coverage pulls in customers -- I'm a past T-Mobile customer -- their plans are much more subscriber friendly that the other guys, but darn I need coverage in a couple of their holes. I'm just one data point, but I'm sure others make the same decision.
Perhaps Google wants to go after the Xiamoi/Kindle model where most money is made on selling apps and value-add services, rather than phones or typical telephony.
T-Mobile's already been doing this though. They're nipping at the heels of the top two enough to make at least AT&T panic.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
Would any wireless company enter into an agreement like this?
Because Deutsche Telekom has been trying to sell T-mobile for years, and Google can afford to buy Sprint from SoftBank too?
Right now the cellular phone industry (at least in the U.S.) is highly vertically integrated. A single company owns the service, owns the towers, owns the POTS connections, and sells the phones. This has resulted in people begrudgingly subscribing with a provider not because they like their phone selection or service plans, but because they have the best network. Or subscribing with another provider because they have an exclusive on a phone. etc.
IMHO this vertical integration is a tremendous impediment to market forces trying to improve price and quality, and needs to be split up. You should be able to buy the phone from anyone. Get your service subscription from anyone. They should be able to contract with individual tower owners to create a network. And connect to the POTS independent of everything else I've just listed. This would make competition orthogonal within each of these layers. The best phones would sell the most independent of other factors. The company with the best plans and prices would get the most subscribers independent of phone selection or tower buildout. Tower networks providing the best coverage would be available to all service providers willing to pay. And POTS interconnects would, like it has for VoIP, be driven down to the cheapest cost for reasonable quality.
The MVNOs were one step in this direction. They partially decouple the service provider and tower networks. I've often wondered why an MVNO doesn't contract with multiple tower owners, which is what Google is doing if it's in talks with both Sprint and T-Mobile (most newer CDMA phones work on both CDMA and GSM networks). The Google Nexus phones (and to a lesser extent the iPhones) are another step in this direction - the same Nexus phone works on all carriers. It's not locked to a specific carrier if you don't buy it from the carrier.
I don't see this as any different than any other MVNO deal. All four major carriers already have a number of deals with fifth-party carriers (e.g. TracFone, Cricket, StraightTalk, Republic Wireless, etc). and if Google wants to get into the MVNO business, then it makes perfect sense to sell to them. Why? Because if they don't buy from you, then they'll just buy from someone else.
MVNO deals produce less revenue per minute or megabyte than retail sales, it is true, but they also take a slice of the risk of dealing with retail customers off of the network owner and put it onto the MVNO. Think of it as bundling in reverse.
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I'm sure Deutsche Telekom would welcome a Google buyout.
It also means that AT&T and Verizon have to start competing on actual service factors, rather than merely existing.
Had Google struck a deal with Verizon and AT&T,
...they would be fucking dead to me. Seriously, AT&T is one of the worst companies that there is. And I've never been a Verizon customer, and I sure hope I never will have to be, because everyone's Verizon stories sound just like my AT&T stories
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Any disruption in the market will hit the bigger two competitors—AT&T and Verizon—significantly harder
How do you figure? I would think ATT has a larger buffer of customers to lose before it goes into the red. Tmo and Sprint are struggling for customers as it is.
I have the exact same problem. I can get good prices from Sprint or T-Mobile and great prices from MVNOs that operate on the Sprint or T-Mobile networks, but in my particularly corner of American suburb hell the reception sucks on either carrier. So I'm stuck paying Verizon or AT&T more than twice as much money for the same data phone plan I could get from Ting.com (shameless plug) because Verizon and AT&T know they offer a better product.
I'm really hoping Google's investment in T-Mobile and Sprint narrows the wireless service gap, because having four more or less equal choices for wireless quality would probably send prices way down.
Easy answer.
AT&T and Verizon represent the two top carriers. They're not about to share any of that marketplace with Google, whom they view as a threat / competitor. Sprint and T-Mobile really have nothing to lose here, so they'll take business in whatever form it presents itself.
I'm waiting to see what happens if / when metros are able to roll out their own citywide wifi networks.
Couple that with wifi voip capable phones and, all of a sudden, the need for cellular services within those areas goes right through the floor.
Considering cellular / wireless is the current Golden Goose for the two major telecoms, I can probably understand why they lobby so hard to
prevent it.
I've had google fiber for about a year now, and I must say that I have never had to contact customer service. The service they've provided me has been incredibly reliable.
I'd much rather give it google than the NSA and law enforcement.
You think there is a functional difference? How cute.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Would any wireless company enter into an agreement like this?
As a consumer I'd love to see google kill one of those fuckers off but why would they put themselves in that position?
MVNO agreements are very lucrative for the operators, and every US operator does them already. They capitalize on an existing resource (And de-prioritize the traffic accordingly) and don't have any overhead of managing payments or tech support. It's exactly like "store brand" foods at the grocery. Price-sensitive consumers flock to MVNOs and the carriers make just as much profit per person (because they still control the actual resource) while expanding their user count and not devaluing their original product by very much.
I was speaking purely numerically. Assuming that a customer from AT&T is just as likely to jump ship for Google as a customer from Sprint is, AT&T would lose significantly more customers simply because they're significantly larger. For any losses it takes, Sprint would gain far more by providing Google's coverage for the customers AT&T loses.
Google owns a lot of fiber. something they might be able to provide to Sprint and TMobile that other MVNO's don't is some additional backbone internet bandwidth. if they ink the deal right, this could end up benefiting all 3 companies. Sprint and TMobile could get cheaper bandwidth and Google gets a last mile connection to more devices.
I would argue it's just Google's way of getting into the wireless market by pouring money (of which they have an inordinate amount) into "weak sisters" in the cellphone business.
The reason I say that is that the lowest penetration of wireless is in rural areas, and the lowest penetration of non-dial-up Internet access is in rural areas (irrespective of speed). So, the biggest need for Internet access is in the very areas where the "weak sisters" have virtually no presence. I believe that puts the lie to the expressed intention of broadening Internet access.
Cell and Internet services in rural areas are plagued by a single problem: Inadequate population density to make capital investments worthwhile. You can roll-out celltowers or fiber in an urban area rather economically, because of the density of customers from whom the fixed costs can be (relatively) quickly recouped. However, getting the capital to do that in a rural area runs up against the need for investors to recoup their investment, which they value as an inverse function of time (i.e., faster ROI is better). Therefore, it is more expensive, and slower to recoup in rural areas, because of a smaller number of potential customers...so, from the contemporary view of investing, "It makes no sense." That's why I claim their just buying their way into eventual ownership of Sprint and/or T-Mobile.
That's only true if there is little competition, or collusion between all of the vendors (which is illegal in the US). If Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint all had great cell phone coverage in my area, then most consumers would pick the one with the lowest price. That would force the others to lower prices in turn. Instead, AT&T and Verizon know they have most of the US market locked up, and they only have to compete with each other.
Why does Comcast charge me $2 per Mbps for my internet connection while Google charges people $0.12 per Mbps in Kansas City? Because I have no choice - if I want 25 Mbps internet service at my house I can choose Comast or I can sell my house and move somewhere else. If I had a choice between two ISPs prices might drop a little, but they could still operate an informal, never explicitly communicated agreement not to price bandwidth below a certain level. If I could choose four ISPs, unless all four specifically engage in illegal price-fixing my cost will start moving towards that Google $0.12 per Mbps level - maybe even better than that.
Because they have the spectrum, and Google can afford to prepay for them to throw up a zillion towers. So those coverage maps will look really different soon. So that's good. Also, Google becomes a customer of theirs.
Bottom line, your question resolves to "Why would any company want to sell a bazillion units, albeit at much lower margins, to Google." And the answer is, a bazillion * small number = large number.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I'll consider it, thanks.
... the distant third and fourth place competitors in a four-horse market.
1 - Verizon Wireless - 125.3M subscribers
2 - AT&T Mobility - 118.7M subscribers
3 - Sprint Corporation - 54.8M subscribers
4 - T-Mobile US - 52.9M subscribers
The upper two are about 2x larger than the smaller two. Significant, but I wouldn't call it "distant". Distant to me would be something like a 10x difference. The market is about 1/3, 1/3, 1/6, 1/6.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
http://www.fiercewireless.com/...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
People will buy "Airtime By Google" more then "Airtime By Sprint" because Google doesn't (yet) have a legacy of toxic customer disservice.
Any Virtual Mobile Network Operator (there are quite a number, I'm on Republic Wireless) has to pay the marketing to acquire customers and take financial risks on payment terms.
The difference is that Google could help Sprint & TM with technical capabilities, backend networking, and organizing
Also Google will gain direct understanding about the performance and capabilities of wireless networks to inform them about how to design Android. And Google will learn how to run a wireless network, which they will eventually do from their satellites.
Google wants to run a comm system which will seamlessly transfer from wifi to terrestrial wireless to satellite wireless, and sell ads by the exabyte.
I wonder if you live near where I live. It's actually pretty funny. My new-ish employer and I go back and forth a bit; he's on Verizon and I'm on T-Mo. He laughed at me when I told him that I really liked T-Mo and that their coverage was great. As I go from place to place, I've never once been without coverage, no matter where. In the office, I have solid LTE...and they have a range extender (i.e. paying Verizon to use your own internet coverage). They've listed basements where they can't get signal, and I'm like, "wait...you don't have service there?" Every. Time. I was surprised when I was at one site where he said that service was sketchy. I had full coverage, and got 6.9MBytes (yes, bytes, not bits) per second downstream.
Now, in fairness, the last time I took an Amtrak ride (last year), there were PLENTY of dead spots, but Verizon had noticeably fewer of them. If "middle of nowhere" coverage is important, then Verizon is still probably the better bet. I sure won't be switching, though.
The company I worked for had a product they called Nova. The Spanish speakers immediately associated it with No Go which is the Spanish translation of Nova.
I had a Ting phone, and during a prolonged power outage due to an ice storm, my wife had flawless reception on her Verizon phone and I had nothing on my Ting phone. This was in the Philadelphia suburbs. That frustrating experience was the impetus for me to switch back from Ting - which was awesome in every way except reception - to Verizon.
At my last job I couldn't get T-Mo while inside the building. New job has me traveling, and I have found all sorts of dead spots, at least for data.