Here is PC World's take on Verizon's announcement this week that it's 4th generation wireless technology will be LTE (Long Term Evolution), akin to the GSM family of technologies in use in a large portion of the world. Surely this decision by Verizon Wireless was influenced by the benefits of the technology itself, but also because its minority (49%) partner, Vodaphone (the world's largest wireless company), also has selected LTE. In a few years the common technology will facilitate broadband roaming worldwide for Verizon's customers.
This LTE decision along with Verizon's announcement that it will open it's present network to other conforming devices and applications that may run on those devices is a positive strategic run-up to the January FCC auction of the 700MHz spectrum. Will Google decide to work with Verizon to build a network if they are successful in obtaining frequencies in this auction?
Google has tremendous talent and expertise in software and certainly a well-honed network of data centers, but really no customer service infrastructure nor 'last-mile' experience to service customers. A partnership between Verizon, Vodaphone and Google would be a powerful combination of talent, networking infrastructure and data servers for a robust worldwide 4G network.
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