Google Will Soon Offer Mobile Service, but It Won't Save You From Verizon

Google’s Sundar Pichai announced that Google would become an MVNO, reselling service from larger carriers, in the coming months. (Photo: Associated Press)

BARCELONA, Spain –– Google is planning to offer mobile phone service in the coming months, but the limited-scale effort won’t be designed to compete with the big carriers.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of products, on Monday confirmed rumors that Google wanted to resell mobile service, becoming what’s known as a mobile virtual network operator, or MVNO. Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Pichai compared the effort to the company’s limited Nexus-branded smartphone sales.

“We want to be able to experiment along those lines, that’s the concept,” he said. “We don’t intend to be a network operator at scale.”

The focus of Google’s network could be on connecting devices other than phones, like watches, cars and other devices that will increasingly include mobile connectivity features, Pichai said.

With those few words, Pichai crushed the hopes of consumers frustrated by the high prices and sometimes poor service of the major mobile carriers. Some had hoped Google would challenge the industry head-on, along the lines of its Google Fiber project to bring superhigh-speed Internet service to homes.

In January, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google had struck deals to resell wireless service from Sprint and T-Mobile. In the United States, the reseller strategy is primarily used by low-cost carriers like TracFone and Ting. MVNOs buy up network services from larger carriers and then repackage them in cheaper deals for consumers. 

Pichai also shot down rumors that Google was interested in opening a chain of retail stores. Any efforts along those lines would be extremely limited, he said.

But Google is moving ahead with its effort to bring Internet connectivity to Africa via balloons that float high in the atmosphere for months at a time. Known as Project Loon, the initiative has entered large-scale testing in Australia in partnership with major phone carriers, Pichai said.

“It sounds like science fiction at first, but they’ve made tremendous progress,” he said. The goal is to bring reliable, high-speed Internet connections to the 4 billion people on earth who currently lack online access, he explained.