At the Mobile World Congress conference, which is taking place in Barcelona, Google has recently announced that they will be launching their own wireless service. The service, which will likely be called “Google Wireless” is essentially going to be a cell phone service operated by Google. Don’t expect them to be moving into your neighborhood anytime soon, however. In the announcement they said they will be starting out small, and they tried to emphasize that they aren’t going to be directly competing with companies like AT&T or Verizon.
Google’s SVP Sundar Pichai said that their goal is, “to drive a set of innovations which we think the system should adopt.” This is, obviously, quite vague and doesn’t really indicate exactly what all they will be doing.
Some experts think this will be similar to the Google Fiber service, which has been popular on a very small scale. Others think it is more similar to the Google Nexus phone that they make.
Google isn’t giving many details at all, so it is all speculation at this point. They have not even identified what geographic area they are looking to start out in or how they would sell or promote the service. According to the Wall Street Journal, they did say the network would be built on a mix of Sprint and T-Mobile network bandwidth as well as reliance on WiFi connections.
Some people even think that Google might implement a free service that is supported by ads. This idea is prompted by the fact that Google’s Eric Schmidt discussed that as an option way back in 2006. Most people don’t think this is likely, however, but you never know what Google will do.
Whatever the case, it is always a good idea for digital marketers to keep up to date on what Google is doing as even the smallest moves by Google can impact the industry greatly.
