.."Can't see it being much of an advantage in Europe and the rest of the world."
guys, if you think a little, it will be clear that google is going to offer the wireless service most probably .. hold on .. for free.
just recall gmail: how much do you actually pay for a 2+GB storage place?
or.. googleEarth, googleMaps, whatever. They are for free. The busines model is no more based on the money from the customers to the serviced provider,
The model is based on the money from the companies putting ads online to the service provider. These are the ones that pay. Virtually.
Then, of course, these are the customers who will pay at the end, but
the extra cost is hidden in the price of things you will buy thnx to those ads.
maybe online, maybe in their shops. but you will see their ads.
no fight, just wanted to point at this option. cheers, mrn

Good points MRN. I was mainly saying that for the most part Europeans will not jump on the "show me the ads" bandwagon. They are more than willing to buy into a two year subsidized phone contract but they hate the branding. In Finland for the most part, branding has failed. I could be wrong but I think that services based on ads will fail as well. People just don't want them. It is considered and invasion of privacy.

It's pointless comparing 3G or any other existing European wireless networking infrastructure with what Google have planned unless there is a similar area of the spectrum available for Google to purchase Europe-wide and to be honest, the chances of that are slim to non existant.

Assuming Google do buy the 700Mhz spectrum on offer, I can't see Google expanding beyond the US market due to insufficient spectrum available world wide. That, or Google will be forced to develop hardware using frequencies specific to each region (and even country) which gets seriously expensive on the hardware front, let alone purchasing the frequencies in the first place! Multiple frequencies is also "messy" for the consumer.

What Google are trying to do sounds interesting, but I can't see it having any impact in Europe (or anywhere else outside of the US) anytime soon.

I think the advantage would be FREE, google is all about FREE to the user, as it gets more users to see ads that are paid for by business.. Thats was there whole move on the FREE wifi in select cities. They could then direct ads based on your location.. as they know within about 300 feet of where your at based on what WIFI access point your are using.

Google has a brilliant ad based revenue stream.. if they an tap into local ad revenue then there going to make more money the only way to do that is show local advertisers that there are customers nearby that are using there service. The way to get users to use it in masses is offer it free. Its a model that works.. This is exactly what they did with there search system.. they built a killer search platform built it to the point that it was used by huge numbers of people.. then they went and said, hey we got xxxxxxxxx users per second.. what to advertise?? the advertisers said heck yeah...

Basicaly if you can track what users are looking for you can direct pertinate advertising at them, its more effective than TV where your broadcasting to a mass of people and only touching a small percentage of interested viewers.

Its the same reason websites that deal with hardware reviews etc have ads for hardware.. they have a captive audience. If you know exactly what a user is doing on the net at all times you can start offering some highly directed ads to them.. and sales from those directed ads will be higher and thus command more cost from the advertiser.. thats what google wants higher priced ads to fund there company.

If Google offered free wireless internet for the entire US how many people do you thing would sign up? I would bet almost anyone that could use it would use it.. thats a huge subscriber base when you think about advertising.

I don't know if you have gmail but there advertising in gmail is very good, there very directed to the subjects in my email, I actually kind of like the advertising its kind of a RSS feed of what out there in context to what I'm actually doing. When people see advertising as freindly assistance.. thats when you know a company is doing a dang good job..


For example, I open a email about Ron Paul and the adverts are for his running mates.. I open a email about offroading the adverts are about offroading.. It's quiet amazing actually. There system works very very well. There trying to take it one step further.

Does this make more sense now?

Ill take the ads in return for freeservices, I now have a free inbound gizmo land line phone number because of google and grand central... free is good, now if it were popups id say diffrently, but google does ads well, no large bandwidth suckers and non intrusive.

eville

i live in germany and sell to the internet service providers and mobile operators. and so far, the mobile operators (T-Mobile and O2, for example) tell me data services with mobile operators are nowhere near meeting expectations. why? too expensive!!! they admit it. europe, i would argue is years behind the US in their price model. why does t-mobile earn so much more in the US than germany? don't know, but prices in the US are much lower.

i don't know finland, but UK, france, germany, netherlands are crazy. why do i pay 1 euro ($1.38) per minute to call france?

give me google!

O2 simply don't understand data - in the UK they have data tariffs that are beyond a joke (you'd have to be insane to sign up) and their 3G network has no HSDPA support, nor is any planned. If you are remotely interested in data, avoid O2.

T-Mobile UK on the other hand offer quite reasonably priced data tariffs - £7.50 ($15) for 1GB HSDPA (3.6Mbit/s) isn't too bad but it doesn't allow modem usage, for this you need to pay £12.50 with an increased 3GB cap. Three offer a 1GB capped HSDPA service for £5/month ($10) - again no modem usage allowed but they don't seem to care if you do - and there is a rumoured £10/month 10GB service (including modem usage) coming soon on Three which will shake up the data market if it materialises.

Mobile data isn't cheap, but it's not prohibitively expensive either and it will come down in price as competition increases, perhaps to the point where it replaces fixed line broadband for some users.