Google plans free nationwide Wi-Fi.

[Dinner]

Hell, they can already do that.

[Vesayen]

I meant the new GSD, google standard dollar.

They could print USD for years.

[Dinner]

They make a hell of a lot of money per employee. That's almost as good as printing your own money.

[Modo44]

Free as in beer. You get Internet access, they get to mine all traffic data.

[One_more_turn]

That makes great sense because telecom carriers are going to squeeze the internet services as the bandwidth gets tighter. The carriers have recently gained much power through mergers and acquisitions. Imagine "toll booths" and "express lanes" on the internet.

If Google owns the network itself, it will be independent of the carriers and will be able to charge access fees against its competitors, such as MSN, Yahoo, Ebay, and Amazon.

I think a great rush to expand the internet capacity will soon take place, the financial market is certainly anticipating this and has bid up stocks of those telecom equipment suppliers into multi-year highs. Should this trend materialize, expect big job increases in this long suffering industry.

[Mr. Harley]

If that is the case, then Google's aquisition of "dark fiber", unused installed fiber-optic cable orphaned by bankruptcies, downsizing, etc. may be one of the cleverest mid-term investments ever made. It reminds me of the history of railroads in the USA.

[Asher]

Originally posted by notyoueither

Search Engine Roundtable points out that the patents all have to do with serving up advertising through a wireless Internet connection maintained by a third party, whose brand Google would include in the presentation of those ads.

Sounds like more attampts to patent 'pointing device' or GUI.

A man of your age should be more concerned about the patent on the comb-over. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-P...S=PN/4,022,227

[Whaleboy]

Google
Googlie

[snoopy369]

Google presumably is going to patent their method of advertising while providing bandwidth; they aren't the first to provide it themselves, and you certainly can't patent an idea.

It's like the difference between patenting the Intel Pentium 4 Processor (or the process used to make such), and patenting the concept of a CPU. As long as a different process were used, someone else could certainly do roughly the same thing.

[reismark]

Assimilation is inevitable.