It was recently rumored that Google could start a prepaid wireless mobile carrier of its own and now the company has confirmed its plans. During his talk today at Mobile World Congress 2015 Sundar Pichai confirmed that the company is working with “existing partners” to develop its own MVNO. He didn’t name Sprint and T-Mobile as the partners, even though they’re the ones it was rumored to be team up with, but did mention that Google has talked about its plans even with AT&T and Verizon.
From what Pichai has said so far it doesn’t look like Google wants to make a dent in the wireless market and take on the likes of Verizon and AT&T. “We don’t intend to be a carrier at scale,” he said.
Pichai pointed out that U.S. carriers are what power most of the company’s Android phones, “and that model works really well for us.”
He did mention some of the ideas that Google is pursuing with this project, like calls automatically reconnecting if someone drops on one end and “seamless” link between cellular data and Wi-Fi networks.
While the Google executive didn’t provide a proper timeframe in which we can expect the service to go live, Pichai said that some of the company’s ideas will “come to fruit in the next few months.” Looks like Google might have something to show at I/O 2015.