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I think it's pretty clear that Google isn't interested in being a telecom themselves, but have been making moves to try to push for the telecom industry to get

I think it's pretty clear that Google isn't interested in being a telecom themselves, but have been making moves to try to push for the telecom industry to get their collective act together. They were instrumental, for example, in getting the FCC to force VZW to treat LTE service as a dumb pipe as a condition of the spectrum sale. And while much has been made of T-Mobile recently going contract-free, Google was pushing that with the original Nexus years ago, and I had a no-contract, un-subsidized G2 through T-Mobile in... 2010? Google already owns a ton of dark fiber, so it kind of makes sense for them to threaten the telecoms with competition to push things along. Building out a mobile network is a much bigger undertaking, so their pushes there have been -- and I suspect will continue to be -- a bit more behind the scenes in nature.

Retric 13y ago
It's not just dumb pipes (ED: dark fiber) they also have YouTube which is ~15% of downstream traffic which they would be happy to stream inside there private network even with peering arrangements.
- commandar 13y ago
  I was referring to the sale of the 700MHz C Block LTE band. One of the conditions of the spectrum license was that VZW couldn't restrict what devices were allowed on the network and that they couldn't restrict what applications ran over the network. VZW got hit with a $1.25M fine by the FCC last year for blocking tethering apps on LTE. http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/31/3207193/verizon-fcc-tethering-700mhz-open-access-fine http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/31/3207193/verizon-fcc-tether...