Google's billion dollar bid for 700MHz wireless spectrum

Move over iPhone. The tech world is now drawing its attention to a rumored gPhone.

Reports are popping up everywhere that Google is shopping around prototypes of mobile phones. Confirmation came from a report from The Wall Street Journal. It reported Google has built prototype cell phones, to be mass-produced by multiple hardware manufacturers.

What might those phones look like? Just as iPhone prototypes began popping up on the Web (long before Apple made an official announcement), so are Google phone prototypes.

Don't expect anyone to guess correctly what a gPhone might look like. But that hasn't stopped designers from dreaming.



This summer's major action adventure is the debate over the Federal Communications Commission's planned 700MHz spectrum auction, scheduled for January.

The story so far: Analog TV will be retired in 2009, freeing up a big chunk of spectrum for wireless networking. The relatively low frequencies involved (700MHz compared to WiFi's 2.4GHz, for instance) means this spectrum essentially offers more bandwidth for the buck. Lower-frequency signals require less power and therefore lower cell density, which translates to lower operational costs for carriers.

Spectrum traditionally is allocated by an auction in which telcos try to outbid each other, in the process driving up the value of the spectrum. (The proposed auction is estimated to bring US$20 billion to $50 billion into the federal treasury). In addition, winners get to do pretty much as they choose with the spectrum they've purchased.

A few weeks ago, Google attempted to do an end run around this model by pledging to bid $4.6 billion for a chunk of spectrum -- but only if the whole shebang came with two constraints:

Open access. As with today's landlines, winning bidders would need to relinquish control of end devices.

Wholesale resale. Winning bidders would be required to resell their bandwidth wholesale to other firms (basically a setup like that of competitive local exchange carriers [CLEC] back in the '90s).

In other words, in Google's proposal, bidders couldn't recoup the cost of their investments by building closed networks.

Read more: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,135084-pg,1/article.html

Google Press Center: Google Intends to Bid in Spectrum Auction If FCC Adopts Consumer Choice and Competition Requirements