Google Voice and Sprint Wireless: the Quiet Telecomm Deal

(Reposted from FDL about a month ago, where it go no attention. The service is rolling out Tuesday, and this seems a good time for a repost.)

The media is all agog with the planned purchase of T-Mobile’s US operation by last-wave carrier AT&T. The combined carrier would be a force to be reckoned with, and be in a much better position to pressure Apple and Google and consumers and terrify Sprint management. Meantime, Google and Sprint have quietly announced integration between Google Voice and Sprint Wireless.


Google:
Over time, we’ve worked to bring an integrated Google Voice experience to your mobile device by building mobile apps, introducing Google Voice Lite, and most recently Number Porting. But we felt that ultimately, the most simple solution would be to partner with carriers to seamlessly integrate Google Voice with your mobile phone. Today, we’d like to share that we’ve teamed up with Sprint to do just that. (link)
Sprint:
OVERLAND PARK, Kan., March 21, 2011 – Sprint (NYSE: S) and Google announced today a new integrated Google Voice™ experience that will allow Sprint customers to set their existing Sprint wireless phone number as their Google Voice number. Sprint customers will be able to take advantage of all the features and benefits of Google Voice without the hassle and fees associated with porting their number. Sprint is the first and only carrier to offer this capability, which will be available soon on all Sprint CDMA phones. (link)

I’m still thinking over the implications. Google has long wanted access to the wireless tele­com­mun­i­ca­tions market, but the history, business practices, and regulatory clout of the major carriers have limited their ambition. With this deal with the relatively smaller carrier Sprint may have given Google their in, much as AT&T gave Apple their in. Sprint has an excellent wireless data network, second, so far as this bird can tell, only to Verizon, and Google gets to distribute its services–and advertising–through that network. Sprint, of course, gets the support of one of the largest and most successful internet firms. If Google acquired Sprint the deal would be subject to careful anti-trust scrutiny but, so far as I can tell, there is no anti-trust issue here: neither Google Voice nor Sprint is a large enough service to create a combined monopoly, or even much of a market force: this deal is made in the hope of growth, rather than to purchase market share. On the other hand, there is a clash of corporate cultures. Google takes as its motto, “Don’t be evil.” Sprint, on the other hand, provides notoriously poor customer service, apparently by policy. How this will play out in the marketplace is hard to imagine: Google does not take kindly to brand dilution and Sprint is not likely to deal well with requests from Google to provide better service to Google Voice users.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The General Intelligence of Robots

“Artificial intelligence” researchers mean by the phrase “general intelligence” two things. One is simply a machine learning system that can, like humans, use its knowledge for many different tasks. This is not something that has currently been built; language models produce language, stable diffusion models produce images, and neither seem to have any concepts of the underlying realities these words and images reflect. The second is the “general intelligence,” g , derived from intelligence tests, which is believed by some to be a unifying reality behind intelligence test scores. In a paper on GPT-4 from Microsoft a Wall Street Journal Editorial by Linda Gottfredson, Mainstream Science on Intelligence is cited as providing a definition of general intelligence. It’s an appalling piece, repeating debunked claims about racial differences in intelligence and claiming as scientific consensus hypotheses that are at best debatable and at worst outright false.
Read more

A Grand Unified Theory of Bad New Economy Firms

The wildly successful internet economy firms mostly operate by evading laws. New technology which has allowed firms to move their business to less-regulated jurisdictions and a generation of deregulation and favorable court decisions have allowed these firms to be bad places to work and bad places to do business with. Here’s a catalog of some of their abuses: Evasion of local laws through national operations . Amazon notoriously picks jurisdictions with lax labor laws for its warehouses. Uber simply ignores local laws until penalized. When penalized, they initiate political campaigns to get the laws overridden at the state level. Extortionate business practices . Doordash infamously underpays its workers. Grubhub notoriously overcharges restaurants . Uber has the resurrected long-illegal practice of raising taxi rates when demand is highest. Monopolistic practices . Enforcement in this
Read more

Richard M. Stallman and the Failure of the Free Software Foundation

(Note: since the writing of the following, the Free Software Foundation has tweeted: “The FSF board unanimously condemns misogyny, racism, and other bigotry as well as defamation, intimidation, and unfair attacks on free thought and speech.” They are rejecting the criticism of Stallman as unfair and, in so doing, they aligned themselves with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. They have put themselves beyond redemption and any fair hearing for their ideas. No-one wants to listen to the logic-chopping of rape apologists – it is as bad as listening to Southern racists excusing slavery.)   This is outside of my usual ambit, and it is about cooperative software development rather than market economics, but it seems to belong here more than anywhere. People who follow free and open source software by now know that alleged harasser and rape apologist Richard M. Stallman has, by a secret process, been restored to the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman has lon
Read more