It seems all our dreams are culminating, and by that I mean Google is finally looking to start selling wireless carrier service. Rumors about this possibility have been floating around for years. Literally, years. Since back when they launched the Nexus One, users started clamoring that Google would begin to sell wireless service and essentially become a carrier. While it may not play out exactly as people were probably hoping, it seems that in some form Google is ready to take the next steps to begin selling you a new wireless carrier plan to meet your needs.
News of this began to surface earlier as reports were stating that Google was looking to become an MVNO for the U.S. third and fourth largest wireless carriers, Sprint and T-Mobile. While there is no information as of yet on the latter, it seems, according to Business Week, that Google has reached an agreement with Sprint to sell wireless service. This means they’ll be using Sprint’s wireless network to offer service to customers. This isn’t something that likely happened over night, as it’s stated Masayoshi Son(CEO of Softbank and owner of Sprint)has had some part to play in getting these talks between the two companies to begin, and things like this take time.
In terms of what Google is forking out to get the ball rolling, they’ll be paying for a portion of the network capacity that Sprint operates to offer up on its own plan terms(Google set prices just like any other MVNO does with their service plans)and it’s said that service could begin as early as sometime later this year, although no exact dates were given nor was there a confirmation on the nature of Google becoming your next carrier in 2015. There also weren’t any details on what this is costing Google. Not that this is related in any way, but Google is technically already competing in some form for the customers of other wireless carriers thanks to the changes made within Google Hangouts. Now that you can simply make your phone calls with data, users who already had a Google Voice number in place have less incentive to subscribe to plans through their carrier that offer larger or any packages of voice minutes. All one needs is a data plan, so why not go all in and become an MVNO?
Google also currently competes with broadband providers via Google Fiber, albeit very sparsely and only in a few locations at this time, to give customers a choice at wickedly fast internet speeds for much less than some of the biggest internet providers, so competing against larger companies in an industry that is technically out of their element is not new to Google. They appear to have the chops to follow through with a plan like this and we wager some people probably couldn’t be happier this sort of deal is taking place. Whether or not we see Google sign a deal with T-Mobile as well remains to be seen, but it isn’t entirely impossible and that notion is more of a reality now than before with confirmation that they’re moving forward with Sprint. This would also give Google another outlet for their own in house branded Nexus devices, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see something of the like when Google Wireless(yes I made that up)comes on to the scene. So many questions are likely floating around right now, like what will the plans cost? When will the service arrive? What devices will they carry if any? And, one that has been popping up in my mind is, will we see an influx of Google’s target ads via this service, because, it’s Google and it’s a large source of revenue for them. All these questions will be answered in due time, now we just have to sit back and wait.