My Time with Google's Cellular Service Was Mostly a Disaster

I use it, and for me it was kind of magical: i traveled to singapore and then turkey in about two months, and didnt have to think about anything. It just worked. Sometimes the network was slow, but i think it was because of local network.

Then the reality sipped in. I had to switch to a local network. I was doing work on laptop, and had to hotspot to laptop. It is impressive to see how much data day to day work consumed. 10$ per gb was too high. I could get local data plan for 1.5$/gb. I think i consumed about 20gb over the course of the trip.

I guess for what it is, google fi is pretty impressive. Except that 10$ could be a bit prohibitive for certain use cases.

Disclaimer: im a google employee.

Edit: changed the data plan cost (to 1.5$ from 2.5)

Can we add (2015) to the end of this? This review is massively out of date, biased, and most of his problems seem to stem his phone had issues, not his service.

As a counterpoint to the article, I used Fi for two years and never had a single technical problem. The service was flawless and affordable. Then I realized Google now had real time location tracking and the ability to turn on my mic whenever they want, along with my email and search data, and that just felt like too much data for a single company to have.

I absolutely love it. I only use it for data and I travel a ton. Never having to hunt down SIM cards every 3 days when I hit a new country with a flat global rate is great. And you get 10 free data sims, so everything that can possibly get a sim jammed into it has one and works in every country.

I've had excellent results with Google fi across the US and Europe. Getting off the plane in Milan and having service immediately was a terrific benefit.

I'm currently on Project Fi and I like it quite a lot. Travelling through Europe was seamless (these were countries that Fi has an agreement with; I assume otherwise I would have to purchase a local SIM, as I had had to do before Fi.) My biggest complaint is a 5-to-25 second delay between pressing the "call this" button and the line being picked up and actually dialed. Very occasionally I'll have a call that doesn't ring, but I had had this with previous providers and with greater frequency. Costs less than Straight Talk and you pay only for what data you use. I'm on WiFi most of the time so my data costs are pretty minimal.

I have Google's phone service and it's horrible. In Europe I would lose all service for days at a time. In the US it just randomly loses all service every few hours for a few minutes. People will call me...and I'll stare at the phone and it won't ring. Then I'll get a missed call notification. I have told my friends that I am sure I will someday die while trying to call 911 over and over and over again.

Google should be ashamed of how horrible it's phone service is.

I can understand this if you're traveling all the time and you have to pay for your own phone bill, but beyond that the pricing seems a little steep especially considering Google can probably use this to wring even more marketing data out of you. Most sim only plans in Australia are about $20-30 cheaper per month than this.

From 2015...

As it happens this caught my attention on hn because my Fi service has sucked for the past 2 weeks after working like a champ for almost 2 years. I think it's my phone though, my wife (same nexus 5x phone, plan) hasn't had any issues.