Newsletter
Google is a company made up of some of the most technologically savvy folks with the biggest brains, from the regular team-separated employees to the senior vice president of Access and Energy Craig Barratt. No, this isn’t Intel’s CEO Craig Barratt, but the ‘other Craig Barratt’, as he’s known in Silicon Valley. But he’s like no other when it comes to what he does and does best.
Having worked at Atheros, bought by Qualcomm a few years back, Barratt worked to develop wi-Fi antennas and protocols that made the acquisition of signal and data easier and more efficient, which is key to his current home team’s new venture into cellular service. The portfolio of things Barratt does, both professionally and personally, is huge, and varies from writing code in-transit to work and home to avid cycling.
Barratt has had previous plans work out well, so this new one should be just as pleasant. He led the effort with Google Fiber, the ultrafast Internet service Google is offering to limited populations in the U.S., as well as working on Project Loon, which floats Internet access via balloons over more rural areas of the globe to provide access and service.
To the Android part of this, the much-anticipated cell phone service to offered by Google with the help of Sprint and T-Mobile’s towers and coverage. But, as many of us might have presumed, Google will not rely on the two for the service. The plan for the service is to have the use of local Wi-Fi networks be the majority of connections that users will have and access. Barratt also has a goal with the Android phone service, which is utilizing more of the radio waves that carriers already own and operate to transmit data, so that users have more and wider-spread access to the data networks that increasing amounts of people are using. the plan will hopefully ultimately resolve itself in lowered costs, which would be more than welcome for those that pay too much.
Barratt has also met with the FCC to argue for the increase of bandwidth as opposed to the current ‘keep it scarce, keep the high prices’ method being practiced by carriers. Barratt, Google, and the likely cell phone service providence are all good things for people when it comes to connectivity. Do you think that Google’s services as a service provider will make an impact on the current methods and practices of the carrier world? Or is it just going to be Google doing things drastically different?