December 21st, 2009 by ahoogA great blog by Charlie Stross on what he sees Google’s ultimate goal in the mobile world…and I like it. Wouldn’t it be great to end the years of being worked over by the likes of AT&T and other carriers? 2010 is going to be interesting…T-Mobile has long been on a path exploring the use of WiFi as a compliment to their service and could provide the avenue needed to turn this market upside down, again.
This is where the Nexus One announced last week may be significant. If the rumours are true — that they’re pushing it at a low or subsidized price, and have strong-armed T-Mobile (the weakest of the US cellcos) into providing a cheap data-only mobile tariff for it, and more significantly access to VoIP and cheap international data roaming — then they've got a Trojan horse into the mobile telephony industry.
I think Google are pursuing a grand strategic vision of destroying the cellco’s entire business model — of positioning themselves as value-added gatekeepers providing metered access to content — and their second-string model of locking users in by selling them premium handsets (such as the iPhone) on a rolling contract.
They intend to turn 3G data service (and subsequently, LTE) into a commodity, like wifi hotspot service only more widespread and cheaper to get at. They want to get consumers to buy unlocked SIM-free handsets and pick cheap data SIMs. They’d love to move everyone to cheap data SIMs rather than the hideously convoluted legacy voice stacks maintained by the telcos; then they could piggyback Google Voice on it, and ultimately do the Google thing to all your voice messages as well as your email and web access.
