Google is actually only using T-Mo and Sprint data, and they're reselling as an MVNO.
Almost all MVNOs are rate-limited below the main users of the main carrier's bandwidth and customers. It's bulk resale of whatever's not being used.
And in the case of TMo and Sprint, neither has much bandwidth left on their busiest sites these days. TMo is scrambling to deploy 700 MHz spectrum that only a few phones right now can even take advantage of, even once they light it up. Sprint isn't flush with network capacity either. Many sites don't have good backhaul either.
So it's an interesting niche that will sell some Nexus devices for Google, but being tied only to their device makes it a non-starter for a whole lot of people.
WiFi calling isn't anything new. See screenshot of my phone I'm typing this on... Top left.
The rollover data pricing is mildly interesting but won't be accepted widely by the industry when they can simply offer "unlimited" and rate limit individual devices as needed.
The Google MVNO doesn't offer much, really. Maybe a tad more coverage by combining networks, but having to use their device kills the whole thing. It's as dead as the Disney MVNO.
I agree about the device limitations being a deal-killer for a lot of people, even putting aside my personal dislike of Google. Phone choices do drive a lot of network decisions. That was something I learned when I was helping out a young fellow who was starting up a multi-carrier cell phone store in Queens some years ago. Most people simply don't care as much about the carrier as they do about the phone (assuming, of course, that the carrier has service where they need it).
I also experienced the same thing as a user recently. I had been on StraightTalk over a VZW tower for years and was perfectly happy with it, but I wanted a new BlackBerry, and neither ST nor VZW support any BB10 devices on prepaid. If they had, I would have been willing to stay on ST or sign up directly with VZW prepaid, but neither was an option. I also looked into VZW postpaid, but the cost increase for essentially the same service would have been absurd.
I had no particular loyalty to VZW. In fact, I still haven't forgiven them for some **** they pulled eight or nine years ago when they sent me a bill for more than $400.00 because Kimberly (then aged 7 or 8) used my phone to access some obscure VZW service that I didn't even subscribe to, to do whatever it was that that service did. She could have been re-aiming the Hubble for all I know.
Whatever the case, VZW outright refused to let me upgrade retroactively to include that service -- it would have cost about $7.00 / month, if I recall correctly -- because I was out-of-contract. Mind you, I was a 10-year customer at the time. Fine. I paid the bill and moved to another carrier. VZW then spent the next year or two trying to get me to come back and even offered to waive the bill, but I refused. The time to make those sorts of offers is before a customer jumps ship, not after.
Nonetheless, I knew for a fact that VZW had good signal where I live, so if I had to hold my nose and go with VZW to get service, that's what I would do. But they wouldn't support a BB10 on prepaid, and their postpaid plans were just too damned expensive.
Enter AT&T. I learned from a clerk at Dollar General that AT&T has a shiny new tower a couple of miles away. The problem is that AT&T doesn't know about it yet. At least their activation database doesn't. Their coverage map does, but their activation database doesn't, which causes the system to barf on new activations from my ZIP code.
No worries, said the clerk. Just enter another ZIP code -- she actually provided one that would work -- when I activated the phone, and it would activate. So I called AT&T, and after several hours on the phone with some very helpful engineers, it turned out that the clerk was right. They assured me that I would have good service here and everywhere else I needed it to work.
The problem then became actually getting a SIM card. Neither Dollar General nor anyone else around here sells them, and AT&T couldn't mail me one because the database still insisted that I would have no service. So my choices were to buy a cheap smartphone at Dollar General just to get the SIM card, or go to an AT&T company store, where they could override the activation database. I chose the latter option. It was a nice 75-mile drive.
The important thing, however, was that aside from being extraordinarily helpful -- especially considering that we were only talking about a single prepaid line -- AT&T would support a BB10 device on prepaid. In fact, the engineer was surprised to learn that VZW wouldn't because BB10 doesn't require BIS nor anything else that makes it more burdensome to the system than any other smartphone. Even pushing updates wouldn't be a problem because VZW does support BB10 devices on postpaid.
So in the end I went with AT&T. Their superb phone support and the fact that the service works well where I need it to are two reasons that I'm glad I did, but the reason I even called them in the first place was because they would cheerfully support the kind of device I wanted on the kind of service I wanted.
So now back to Google. Although I suppose that they'll introduce additional phones over time (assuming that they don't just kill the service at some future time and leave their users stranded, which is something they've done before with other services), it's a deal-killer for people who want any other device. Add on the facts that the deal really isn't all that great, and that any phones they offer are sure to be stuffed full of Google spyware, and I'll be very surprised if this service becomes popular with anyone other than Google fanboys.
But hey, that's still a sizable market, so maybe they'll make it work. Personally, I'd rather have hernia surgery without anesthesia than give Google yet another way to snoop on me, but that's just me.
Rich
