Google gets into mobile

20-dol­lar basic pack­age

An­other ad­van­tage of Google's Pro­ject Fi is that it will be able to con­nect to other de­vices, such as tablets or lap­tops, and will have in­ter­na­tional cov­er­age, which so far in­cludes more than 120 coun­tries. The basic pack­age an­nounced by Google will have a fixed price of 20 dol­lars a month and in­cludes a flat rate for calls, un­lim­ited SMS, in­ter­na­tional cov­er­age and the pos­si­bil­ity of teth­er­ing (using the mo­bile de­vice as a router to pro­vide in­ter­net ac­cess to other de­vices, such as a tablet). Other ser­vices will be avail­able as per­son­alised plans, de­pend­ing on the cus­tomer's needs, cost­ing 10 dol­lars for each extra gi­ga­byte re­quired. The main plus, though, is that Google com­mits it­self to re­turn­ing money to cus­tomers if they do not use their full al­lo­ca­tion of data ac­cess. Thus, if a cus­tomer pays 30 dol­lars for ac­cess but in one month only uses 1.4 gi­ga­bytes of band­width, the com­pany pledges to re­turn the un­used 16 dol­lars of ac­cess in the fol­low­ing month's bill.

Charg­ing for un­used band­width has be­come an im­por­tant source of rev­enue for most op­er­a­tors. How­ever, re­cently in the States, some providers are be­gin­ning to pass on un­used gi­ga­bytes to the fol­low­ing month, a strat­egy also em­ployed by some op­er­a­tors in Spain. In the US, com­pe­ti­tion in the mo­bile sec­tor has be­come in­creas­ingly fierce in re­cent months, es­pe­cially since Google an­nounced its in­ten­tion to join the fray. In re­sponse to the po­ten­tial com­pe­ti­tion, some op­er­a­tors have al­ready begun to offer new ser­vices to their cus­tomers.

Wire­less con­nec­tiv­ity

How­ever, many an­a­lysts in the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions sec­tor be­lieve that Google is not look­ing to put large ri­vals, such as AT&T and Ver­i­zon, out of busi­ness, but rather it wishes to draw at­ten­tion to the sec­tor and show that there are more in­ter­est­ing ways of pro­vid­ing wire­less con­nec­tiv­ity. In fact, in the past, Google has started sim­i­lar ini­tia­tives, such as un­veil­ing its own su­per­fast in­ter­net net­work that uses fibre op­tics.

The di­rec­tion taken by Google is un­likely to be fol­lowed im­me­di­ately by other op­er­a­tors. The techno-giant can in­tro­duce mea­sures like this be­cause it has no need to in­vest in in­fra­struc­ture, mean­ing that any fi­nan­cial risk is kept to a min­i­mum and eas­ily as­sumed by a com­pany of its size. In con­trast, con­ven­tional op­er­a­tors have had no op­tion but to spend huge sums on their mo­bile net­works, which means tak­ing huge fi­nan­cial risks at the same time.

How­ever, Google is not the only on­line busi­ness look­ing at mak­ing the leap into mo­bile. Face­book has also re­cently an­nounced that it is test­ing a new mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tion that iden­ti­fies caller num­bers even when the per­son call­ing is not in the phone's ad­dress book. Such a ser­vice could allow users to bet­ter man­age the calls they take, as well as being able to make calls freely over the so­cial net­work.