Google Inc on Wednesday said it was launching its own US mobile wireless service, with considerable potential savings for customers using their devices at home and for international travel.
The service — called Project Fi — is available only by invitation for now and only for the Google Nexus 6 smartphone.
The service is to use Wi-Fi hotspots along with the US mobile networks of Sprint and T-Mobile, and may also be used in 120 countries without roaming charges.
It is to be offered at a monthly cost of US$20 for basic service plus US$10 per month for each gigabyte of data used. Customers will only pay for the data they use, unlike some carriers which offer packages.
The service “automatically connects to more than a million free, open Wi-Fi hotspots we’ve verified as fast and reliable,” Google said in a blog post. “When you’re not on Wi-Fi, we move you between whichever of our partner networks is delivering the fastest speed, so you get 4G LTE in more places.”
Google said the connections would be encrypted and the phone number “lives in the cloud, so you can talk and text with your number on just about any phone, tablet or laptop.”
For global travel, Project Fi will enable low-cost calling in many countries and data access at 3G speeds without additional charges.
The new service could give a boost to the Nexus handset line from Motorola Mobility, which was sold by Google last year to Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想), and eventually to other phones powered by Google’s Android operating system.
“This will be Google’s biggest effort to displace Apple,” Enderle Group consultant and analyst Rob Enderle said.
“Apple’s vulnerability is on margins; they have to have big ones so they haven’t been able to do [a mobile service] that would be competitive with a carrier. Google therefore can provide a better and vastly more aggressively priced service than Apple can offer with a carrier,” Enderle said.
However, analyst Jack Gold at J. Gold Associates said the project would be “very limited” and unlikely to create immediate problems for big carriers AT&T and Verizon.
“It’s just Google trying to stir everything and trying to say: ‘Maybe there’s a better way to do this whole wireless connectivity thing,’” Gold said. “It’s not going to cost them a lot of money to do this. Google isn’t investing anything in infrastructure.”
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said its materials management head, Vanessa Lee (李文如), had tendered her resignation for personal reasons. The personnel adjustment takes effect tomorrow, TSMC said in a statement. The latest development came one month after Lee reportedly took leave from the middle of last month. Cliff Hou (侯永清), senior vice president and deputy cochief operating officer, is to concurrently take on the role of head of the materials management division, which has been under his supervision, TSMC said. Lee, who joined TSMC in 2022, was appointed senior director of materials management and
Gudeng Precision Industrial Co (家登精密), the sole extreme ultraviolet pod supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), yesterday said it has trimmed its revenue growth target for this year as US tariffs are likely to depress customer demand and weigh on the whole supply chain. Gudeng’s remarks came after the US on Monday notified 14 countries, including Japan and South Korea, of new tariff rates that are set to take effect on Aug. 1. Taiwan is still negotiating for a rate lower than the 32 percent “reciprocal” tariffs announced by the US in April, which it later postponed to today. The
MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR: Revenue from AI servers made up more than 50 percent of Wistron’s total server revenue in the second quarter, the company said Wistron Corp (緯創) on Tuesday reported a 135.6 percent year-on-year surge in revenue for last month, driven by strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers, with the momentum expected to extend into the third quarter. Revenue last month reached NT$209.18 billion (US$7.2 billion), a record high for June, bringing second-quarter revenue to NT$551.29 billion, a 129.47 percent annual increase, the company said. Revenue in the first half of the year totaled NT$897.77 billion, up 87.36 percent from a year earlier and also a record high for the period, it said. The company remains cautiously optimistic about AI server shipments in the third quarter,
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Thursday met with US President Donald Trump at the White House, days before a planned trip to China by the head of the world’s most valuable chipmaker, people familiar with the matter said. Details of what the two men discussed were not immediately available, and the people familiar with the meeting declined to elaborate on the agenda. Spokespeople for the White House had no immediate comment. Nvidia declined to comment. Nvidia’s CEO has been vocal about the need for US companies to access the world’s largest semiconductor market and is a frequent visitor to China.
RSS