

Google's Private Cell Phone Network - FreeKill
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/510341/googles-private-cell-phone-network/

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trotsky
It's really depressing to see 100+ media outlets go along for the ride on this
story without doing a shred of independent thinking. This is smack inside LTE
band 41, and part of the publicly announced clearwire shift from Wimax to TD-
LTE. Sprint has established contracts for access to this space and has
announced the lighting of the band this summer with handsets to follow in
3Q13. Clearly google wants to be able to test basebands, and nowhere in the
world has the unique combination of band 41 TDD, FDD and CDMA2000 handoff
requirements.

The story in the WSJ was just a placement - the analyst works for a firm
representing some big clearwire stockholder that is just lobbying for a better
price on the NTT/sprint buyout of clearwire.

Google would have to be fucking morons to build some sort of custom
basestations and mobile devices smack ontop of license only spectrum thats
been designated by the ITU-R.

~~~
8ig8
Nobody is _paying_ for news, so why should they? With limited resources, is
this where a news director would choose to focus?

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eli
This post is a summary of a WSJ which is mostly a summary of this blog post:
[http://stevencrowley.com/2013/01/23/googles-confidential-
tes...](http://stevencrowley.com/2013/01/23/googles-confidential-test-might-
be-a-super-dense-lte-network-using-clearwires-spectrum/) It includes more
technical information and less idle speculation.

The frequencies used are 2524-2546 and 2567-2625 MHz which are licensed to
Clearwire but not (yet) widely used for anything.

> _We don’t know yet exactly what Google is testing here. It might be devices
> it created. I suspect, though, that this is a test of a network architecture
> or service, using existing equipment. Google has been lobbying the FCC to
> approve the agency’s proposed shared-spectrum small-cell service in the
> 3550-3650 MHz band, and these test results might be relevant there._

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wtracy
I really like the "cell phone that connects to multiple networks" idea. Not
just for the ability to make the cheapest call, but for the ability to make a
call from anywhere that has reception from _any_ provider.

I wonder if that could pave the way for boutique carriers that provide
connectivity in hard-to-reach spots (say, the bottom story of a parking
garage). The building owner could potentially take a cut on the phone fees the
same way that building owners extract a fee from ATMs on their property.

~~~
jmillikin
It's called "roaming", and most modern phones support it. The "cheapest tower
wins" roaming described in the article would be difficult to achieve because
of the massive web of contracts required. Not to mention the terrible user
experience -- most users DON'T want the cheapest possible connection, they
want the one that won't drop their calls.

~~~
batgaijin
But what if it's voip and it can connect to multiple cheap towers
simultaneously?

I am so glad google is doing this; I seriously thought we were going to have
to wait for new regulation.

~~~
jmillikin
Then you're paying for a connection to each tower, which in aggregate is
likely to be more expensive than a single connection to a reliable provider.

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tnuc
>...offering the flagship Nexus One smartphone online and unlocked. That
experiment lasted only about six months, after Google struggled to cope with
customer service requests and learned that U.S. consumers are apparently
happier paying a significant markup for a device over two years than a smaller
sum upfront.

Google learnt what? Then why is the Nexus 4 sold out?

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ryanhuff
We know that there are more people willing to pay between $300 and $350 than
Google/LG produced. We just don't know how many phones Google/LG has produced.
If the supply of Nexus 4's were anywhere similar to the number of Samsung
Galaxy S2's or S3's, then I would strongly agree with you.

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cbryan
Does anyone know what bands they're talking about? What's the theoretical max
bandwidth on these new frequencies?

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ChuckMcM
I'm guessing that since Google pushed so hard in the white space auctions of
years past that they would use those bands.

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notatoad
Another story claimed that these were the buildings that the google fibre team
works out of, and there wasn't anything android related in these buildings.
Anybody with more knowledge than some random blog care to comment?

~~~
rachelbythebay
The article calls it the west end of campus and shows buildings in the 12xx
range. Given the main address is 1600, and those addresses go up as you go
west, how does that work, exactly?

Given that, I wouldn't read too much into any geographic claims in this
article.

