I just traveled to Japan, the Phil, Bulgaria, San Francisco, and Boston without having to change sim cards or worry about my data situation. I'm going to keep it until someone else can do the same at a lower price.
Keep in mind that you'd be just as out of luck if you wanted to switch phones while traveling, like if your primary was lost or stolen. For that reason, I canceled fi immediately upon returning to the states and strongly caution anyone I know against fi for extended travel.
Edit: ah, you were using a physical SIM. Mildly ironic that you'd have a worse experience "re-pairing" than with an eSIM.
Related anecdote: at 34c3 last year, I was able to activate Fi while in Germany, but 6 months later, no matter how many agents I talked to (none of whom identified being in Europe as the problem), I wasn't able to reactivate it in Europe. This was because I had paused my service and switched phones, and they apparently implemented checks to prevent activation outside the USA.
Or, I was the accidental beneficiary of the various GSM hacking going on at Congress, and it never was supposed to work in the first place.
Curious if it'd be effectual (although impractical) to use an AT&T femtocel to activate while abroad…
My normal day-to-day has me on WiFi the majority of the time so my phone bill usually comes out to about $36 a month.
Edit: For the curious, I've been using Fi with a Pixel 2 since the phone was released.
The US is a wierd place..
https://www.3.dk/abonnementer/mobil/40-gb-mobilabonnement-in...
The fact is that the calling rates are very reasonable by default while traveling abroad, and there are no extras charged for data or text. I rarely travel internationally, but not to be held back by my phone! There are no special travel packages to buy, it just works wherever you go.
Trade offs!
I suspect that their partners in europe throttle with an algorithm so aggressive it flat-out breaks TCP.
Remember when web pages were measured in kilobytes? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
The last time I tried using it overseas, text-heavy sites like HN loaded almost as fast as normal. Reddit was mostly usable, but certain subreddits were painfully slow due to image-heavy custom styles. But try to load an article from a typical news website, and the connection would time out before it managed to render anything.
1. Better and more reliable coverage 2. Roaming surcharges for my (Google Fi) calls where less (albeit, nominally so) at $0.20/min vs $0.25/min 3. While she had some problems enabling her data, the transition of my service in this respect was absolutely seamless (and as just fast as here in the States) 4. Importantly, Google Fi supports tethering abroad whereas T-mobile does not