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Google Buying Sprint Nextel? Doubtful.

When you’re in the tech business you hear some pretty wild rumors. Some pan out to be true, some are sorta true, and others seem like they could be a ride in Fantasyland. We heard one of the latter today that left us scratching our heads. Could Google possibly be considering a purchase of of mobile carrier, Sprint Nextel?

It seems to pop up from the fact that Sprint Nextel and Clearwire have gone their separate ways over the WiMax deal. Both Google and Sprint Nextel have been mentioned previously as working on a WiMax agreement, but this is the first we’re hearing of an outright purchase.

With the announcement of Google’s multi-carrier team-up for the mobile OS, Android, it seems fairly unlikely that Google would suddenly say “Hey, thanks for help developing and deploying this mobile platform… now we’re going in to direct competition with you!” This would be a good way to rack up some hefty legal fees as every carrier would take Google to task with the FCC over more issues than we could ever list.

Google is probably up to something with Android, and their apparent interest in buying a chunk of the 700 MHz band to be auctioned off next year, but this seems like an unlikely avenue for them. So far Google has stayed pretty firmly in the realm of software and serving up ads: to go in to a turbulent hardware industry, deal with monthly subscribers, and bring even more lawsuits against them for any number of things, seems unlikely.

What does seem likely is the idea that they want the mobile carriers to come to them for ads, software, and bandwidth. That, however, is a whole other kettle of fish.

For now, I would recommend taking the idea of a Google purchase of Sprint Nextel with a generous helping of salt.

(via tmcnet.com)

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관련 기사 : http://mashable.com/2007/11/11/google-buying-sprint-nextel-doubtful/