Gmystery

What is Google’s game plan for wireless?
The easy answer: I have no clue.
But as we await the outcome of the FCC’s 700 MHz auction, and the winner of the C-Block licenses, I’m ready to speculate on the search-engine giant. Google is everywhere in wireless these days; it presumably has placed bids in the 700 MHz auction; it swung a deal with the world’s largest wireless device manufacturer to be included on Nokia handsets “in select markets;” it helped to launch an open-source mobile platform called Android; it’s even taking part in white spaces tests using technology it developed to see if that slice of that spectrum can be used without causing interference to existing operations.
Does Google really want to own spectrum? I think not. Becoming a licensed operator, having to follow federal laws concerning how fast a company builds its business, and complying with a thicket of federal and even state and local laws is a messy, complicated business. Why would Google want to get into that? Google wanted open-access provisions to better serve its indexing service, or even to allow a Google-branded device to operate on someone else’s network, providing easy wireless access to its search engine. It already got that.
I talked with Dan Olschwang, Jumptap CEO at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. (Jumptap offers a competing white-label mobile search technology to wireless carriers.) Olschwang defines Google’s strategy as this: Google wants people to go to Google. Olshwang has a point. Google’s deal with mobile operators gives Google access to that operator’s customers. Ultimately Google could become a direct competitor with existing partners like Nokia and wireless operators. Maybe that’s why T-Mobile dropped Google in favor of Yahoo. But then wireless manufacturers and operators are both becoming Internet companies; could it be that one day a carrier is no longer a carrier?
On another note, I recently asked what is happening to veteran infrastructure providers and I got a couple of interesting insights from readers. One astute reader said that the Chinese infrastructure vendors can provide financing options that the rest of the industry can’t match. Ah, I thought vendor financing lost its allure after the industry’s 2G buildout.