Google Wants To Be a Wireless Carrier

zacharye writes "Google has already conquered the software side of smartphones and now the technology giant is reportedly in talks to take over the air waves. A report on Thursday claims that Google has held talks with satellite television provider Dish Network regarding the possibility of a venture that would see Google launch its own cellular network and compete directly with the likes of Verizon and AT&T."

Re:Technical Question

[kriebz]

No, SMS came from a GSM feature that sent data in tiny packets in the control channel phones used all the time for presense and syncronization. The bandwidth was always in constant use, so packing data into it didn't really cost anything. CDMA probably implements a similar feature that uses squat bandwidth.

Now, the weird thing is, carriers charge the same for SMS as MMS, at least in my experience, where MMS uses 3G to send potentially a lot of data.

Re:Technical Question

[YoopDaDum]

The pricing is not so much driven by the technology than by what operators can charge. It's particularly true for text, where the margin is really really huge and unrelated to technology. But as it's a geek site let's go over the tech now ;) All 3 use slightly different mechanisms.

Short messages (SMS, or text) piggy back over the signaling protocol.

With GSM and WCDMA 3G (3GPP standards), voice and data share the same radio network. But on the network side there are separate core networks for voice (CS domain, for Circuit Switched) and data (PS domain, for Packet Switched). In the CDMA world there are actually separate radio networks for voice (CDMA 1x) and data (EVDO). This is why you can't do both voice and data at the same time on most CDMA phones: it would require 2 radios, which adds cost and complexity. Whereas with 2G/3G, both goes over the same radio network so both can operate concurrently with a single radio.

Starting with 4G, or LTE in practice, there is still a single radio network as before but now the core (EPC, Evolved Packet Core) is also unified and built over IP. Voice over LTE (VoLTE) is not common yet but it's basically VoIP built on IMS. All is unified, but voice is of course prioritized over best effort data using QoS both in the RAN (radio access network) and EPC.