Google to acquire UK spectrum ?

Thomas Husson | September 21, 2007, 03:59 AM

Google has already and clearly expressed its interest in acquiring spectrum in the US.

According to Bloomberg, Google may bid for the new spectrum to be allocated in the auction to be held by Ofcom. It is not clear to me yet which spectrum they are referring to: 900Mhz, 1800 MHz or 2100Mhz. I think we are only at the consultation stage, which is supposed to be open until November 29th.

So this may well increase the speculation on Google as an operator or as a device manufacturer. See previous post here and the take of my colleague Julie Ask in RCR Wireless here.

Still difficult to comment at this stage. However, Google is an advertising company. It started to turn into a platform company trying to sell softwares, applications and services that could boost its ad revenues. Will it turn into a hardware manufactuer or even into mobile network operator, a MVNO or a telecom reseller ? Next months will be interesting to follow. Google's heavy interest in the mobile space is not necessarily a good news for the telecom operators.