Google's wireless service won't take on Verizon and AT&T

Google (GOOGL) is planning to offer mobile phone service in coming months, but the limited scale effort won’t be designed to compete with the big carriers.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of products, on Monday confirmed rumors that Google wanted to resell mobile service, becoming what’s known as a mobile virtual network operator, or MVNO. Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Pichai compared the effort to the company’s limited Nexus-branded smartphone sales.

“We want to be able to experiment along those lines, that’s the concept,” he said. “We don’t intend to be a network operator at scale.”

The focus of Google’s network could be on connecting devices other than phones, as watches, cars and other devices increasingly will include mobile connectivity features, Pichai said.

With those few words, Pichai crushed the hopes of consumers frustrated by the high prices and sometimes-poor service of the major mobile carriers. Some had hoped Google would challenge the industry head-on, along the lines of its Google Fiber project to bring super-high-speed Internet service to homes.

In January, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google had struck deals to resell wireless service from Sprint (S) and T-Mobile (TMUS). In the United States, the reseller strategy is primarily used by low-cost carriers like TracFone and Ting.

Pichai also shot down long-running rumors that Google was interested in opening a chain of retail stores, perhaps to compete with same-day delivery service from Amazon (AMZN). Any efforts along those lines would be extremely limited, he said, again referring to the company's Nexus line of smartphones.

But Google is moving ahead with its effort to bring Internet connectivity to Africa via balloons that float high in the atmosphere for months at a time. Known as Project Loon, it has entered large-scale testing in Australia in partnership with major phone carriers, Pichai said.

“It sounds like science fiction at first but they’ve made tremendous progress,” he said. The goal is to bring reliable, high-speed Internet connections to the four billion people on earth who currently lack online access, he explained.