Google is looking to become a mobile service provider as well

The US government has cleared the way for Google to become your next cellphone network provider – possibly without costing the company a pretty penny. As we revealed yesterday, the advertising giant wants to use the largely open spectrum at 3.5GHz to provide high-speed mobile data connections at low cost to phones and gadgets in cities. The main stumbling block, for Google, is getting Uncle Sam to open up the radio space in a way that would give the company exclusive access to specific frequencies without having to buy an expensive license; cellphone networks typically spend hundreds of millions of dollars on buying the rights to use the ether. Another hurdle is that the electronics in the vast majority of today’s mobes and fondleslabs can’t use that 3.5GHz slot, but it is in one of the approved bands for LTE. Another problem is that 3.5GHz signals will be rather short-range, so it’s only good for cities and towns where lots of small cells can be deployed.