It seems that “GoogleTel” is arising out the last moves and acquisitions. GoogleTel = Ubiquisys (Femtocells) + Bandwidth (Dark Fiber and 700MHz Spectrum) + Grand Central (One Number ID). The total disruption of mobile and fixed line telephony by off…

Chris
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Google is saying we will bid at least the minimum if you run the auction in a way that will give us access to the spectrum win or lose.

If they get the terms of the auction changed, their incentive to bid is lower.

If they intended on bidding competitively, there would be no need for the statement, they probably would keep things secret.

Without at all discounting the importance of opening up phone networks, a large portion of the “stagnant” situation you talk about is also a result of a previous pro-consumer and pro-Internet feature of US telephony– unmetered local phone calls. Unmetered phone calls meant that US adoption of the Internet in the modem age was much faster than other countries. But it’s also meant a much larger legacy install base of narrowband users, some of which have proved amazingly reluctant to go to even $20/month DSL deals when available in their area. There are many people I’ve tried to convince to get broadband with fairly little success. Many people just don’t see the need for speed.

The relative expensive of local phone calls in most other countries (sans Canada) drove the spread of DSL for Internet access.

Opening up the phone networks for competitive DSL will certainly prevent investment in the old copper network. In my opinion, we DO want companies to build new networks, and one way of doing that is to make the old legacy networks less profitable while not interfering with investment in new networks. At the same time, I’m disturbed at the people who seem to spend all their effort attacking new networks and wanting to regulate them. The old incumbent networks should be regulated, but brand new investment less so. (And when one company, like Verizon, owns both sorts of networks, regulate the one more than the other.)

That said, I’m not so sure it’s all that heroic on Google’s part to say they’ll pony up big dough for broadband, but only with the caveat that the FCC implement policies everyone knows they’re never going to implement under current AT&T/Verizon friendly leadership…..

Is Google learning to lobby and play political PR tricks? Yeah. Does that mean much when they’re up against probably the third most effective lobbying machine (aside from oil and pharma/insurance) ever built?