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Comment by lopkeny12ko | Hacker News Reader

While everyone knows that all wireless carriers are universally terrible, I've actually had a fairly noneventful (read: good) experience with T-Mobile over the last decade. I've never observed evidence of traffic shaping or any other shady business (like capturing NXDOMAIN DNS responses and directing you to a sponsored search page). I've also never observed significant performance degradation from congestion-based prioritization after exceeding the alloted 50 GB or whatever of monthly "normal-priority" data usage.

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Yeah, except they leak customer data regularly and have offshored tons of customer service to India -- including onboarding. When I tried to sign up, they didn't know what an esim was and wanted my SSN, along with other data that could easily be used to steal my identity. I don't want to spend my days arguing with people, definitely not about the existence of esim; but I did that day. It went all the way up their customer service management chain.

T-Mobile is also completely hit or miss with service. If you are in a location where it works, fine. Good luck if you travel.

If you can tolerate T-Mobile, Google Fi is better in almost every way security wise -- and I am very anti-google services these days. It uses the T-Mobile network.

As for me? ATT has provided the best service of any carrier while traveling, so I will use them. When I need security, I flip on my VPN.

> If you can tolerate T-Mobile, Google Fi is better in almost every way security wise -- and I am very anti-google services these days. It uses the T-Mobile network.

Be careful there, because T-Mobile rot spreads to any downstream MNVO. Sim-jacking is still possible and data breach is happening above Google Fi level. There were articles about that IIRC.

    ATT has provided the best service of any carrier while traveling, so I will use them.

Really? My experience with AT&T while traveling has been pretty awful. In the US, in rural areas, Verizon is better. And outside the US, Google Fi gives you international data roaming as part of the base package. One of the reasons I switched to Google Fi is because it's so much better when traveling.

I used Google Fi for a while, and while I'd love to use them as a primary carrier again, I can't until they choose to support add-on SIMs for watches. As a Google Fi and YoutubeTV customer, I cannot wait until I no longer have to give AT&T any money at all.

The only thing with Fi is that it is T-Mobile, and you'll always be in a lower priority block of customers compared to people paying for T-Mobile directly, which mean you'll see slower traffic in congested areas at peak times (including e.g. during rush hour traffic).

If you're travelling, I find it hard to beat Fi.

You literally land in a new country, turn your phone back on and you get a "Welcome to [country] - your data rate is the same" message almost anywhere.

Personally - I've flown from Taiwan to Brazil to Amsterdam and then back to the US and I don't have to think about my phone. It just works.

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Outside of the travel use-case, I would also probably pick something else, but if I know I'm going to be travelling, I'll switch back to Fi.

With eSim and the Airalo app, international travel is fairly painless. It costs a few bucks and a couple minutes to setup (which can be done while waiting at the airport to leave) to get a data-only sim for your destination county. If you're paying for an expensive domestic account for international reasons instead of a cheaper $40/mo eg Mint mobile plan, it might be worth investigating theirs plans to see if it would end up saving money, given your travel requirements.

Fi is $40 a month for the more expensive plans, plus $10/gb until the plan hits 10gb, at which case it's free but they might throttle.

And the key thing is I just don't have to think about it. I can't forget to register a new account, I don't have to worry about esoteric sign up requirements for certain countries (ex: Brazil wants a CPF for fucking everything), and I can't get stuck without a connection and then not be able to setup the next step.

I still have my Sprint plan. This is how it works by default. (Sprint + gvoice = google fi; before gfi you could merge your gvoice and sprint accounts which was really cool. Then they cancelled that and started gfi) Since the TMo merger, I suspect gfi is still using the Sprint stuff.

> Since the TMo merger, I suspect gfi is still using the Sprint stuff.

Since before the merger, it used Sprint and T-Mobile, in addition to US Cellular https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/17/googles-project-fi-now-cap... (ctrl-f sprint)

Thats not true, Google Fi has the same priority as postpaid T-Mobile. This is something MVNOs negotiate in their contracts with carriers, not something thats true across the board.

Discount MVNOs increase their margins by buying wholesale deprioritized data while Google Fi has negotiated the no deprioritization.

Is this talked about somewhere? All I see is this reddit post[0] by u/Peterfield53, which looks like a very active user on r/GoogleFi but doesn't seem to be a Googler or otherwise a Google Fi support agent.

0: https://old.reddit.com/r/GoogleFi/comments/ulc1t5/perks_of_f...

https://old.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/oaophe/data_pri...

>QCI 6 is applied to all of T-Mobile's postpaid and prepaid plans (except for Essentials) and Google Fi which also has QCI 6 as well. This means if you want the absolute best from T-Mobile, you want to get a plan directly from them. Even their cheap $10 prepaid 1GB Connect plan has priority data.

You can apparently confirm this with a rooted phone: https://coveragecritic.com/2019/09/17/how-to-find-qci-values...

>My Google Fi service had a QCI of 6 during regular data use.

That seems to track with my experience: Google Fi in the US was no worse than T Mobile directly (which my work phone uses).

For coverage it’s Verizon > AT&T > T-Mobile. So maybe it was awful compared to Verizon, but it can be worse. I remember a doctor friend I was hiking a mountain with (La Plata, a 14k ft peak in Colorado) who took a patient call at the very summit.

As a tmo customer I know I’m essentially off-grid in much of the country when I’m outside many metropolitan areas.

But tmo is great for traveling internationally.

I've been to every state in the contingent US, most many more times than once, and spent most of my time in rural areas / wilderness. Verizon was poor during the time I had it. I forgot what triggered switching from them but I didn't last long, had to switch to ATT. I switched to ATT because my Tesla uses them and I noticed it almost always had service in remote areas when I did not. Haven't needed to switch since.

ATT has a great plan for the Americas, south America is all covered, Canada is covered, and many other places. It worked really well for me in Brazil.

That said, when I start traveling to Europe and Asia more, I may switch back to Google Fi.

For domestic use, while traveling / on the road a lot? I would rate as follows:

ATT > Google Fi > T-Mobile > Verizon

Keep in mind, if you are mostly stationary it is better to use the carrier known for good service in your fixed location.

If I have to pick between T-Mobile and Google, I pick T-Mobile. Google is going to kill Fi and Voice one day, T-Mobile is not. T-Mobile has some customer service, including stores, Google has none. Was able to migrate a physical SIM to an eSIM in a store in ~30 min. You can even move your Google Voice number to a T-Mobile DIGITS number for similar functionality.

(T-Mobile customer for 2+ decades, least terrible option imho)

EDIT: > Google Voice app may be slow but it does work every time

Until it doesn't! Fair critique though. I can also recommend the "Unlisted" iOS app for this purpose.

> You can even move your Google Voice number to a T-Mobile DIGITS number for similar functionalit

You had my interest...till i read the reviews of the DIGITS app on the app store. 1.9 average, most complains about it not working at all. Google Voice app may be slow but it does work every time

> As for me? ATT has provided the best service of any carrier while traveling, so I will use them.

I'm curious about your reasons to say that AT&T provides the best service "while traveling". I'm guessing it would be domestic travel, because AT&T roaming charges are the second highest among the big three (I believe Verizon is actually even more expensive).

I was a customer and an employee of AT&T for a while, and I find T-Mobile to be better in almost every aspect, except perhaps for coverage in very rural areas, which I don't mind. T-Mobile 5G coverage and speed is also significantly better.

Do you mean international charges? I thought roaming has not been a thing for a decade.

Many ATT plans include usage in all of the western hemisphere, excluding the Caribbean islands. And for countries not included, it is $10 per day ($5 for other lines on your plan) up to 10 days in a billing cycle, and after that it is free until the next billing cycle.

Not the cheapest (I think T-Mobile has international at $5 per day), but not terrible either for a quick jaunt somewhere and not having to worry about SIMs or changing phone number or whatever.

Right, roaming as in international roaming.

I’m on T-Mobile right now, and the plan equivalent to the one I had with AT&T (all inclusive and unlimited data), does include 5GB of international data per month. AT&T was $10, even for employees, so not a great deal for frequent travelers.

Basic international is included on most t-mobile plans.

T-Mobile objectively has the best network if you have good reception. They locally peer, you're getting your own IPv6 address, and their interconnections are excellent (except with AT&T as AT&T refuses to peer and they use Zayo which will take you across the US).

AT&T by far has the worst network, even if you have great service. They NAT millions of devices behind a single /64 network, you're usually routed to IXs very far away from you, and they do the most packet manipulation out of all the carriers. Verizon is better, but they can do some wacky stuff if you aren't in New England or California.

I have too, mostly…

But apart from all the data breaches, I was also able to verify T-Mobile doing this (arbitrary blocking of texts containing innocuous URLs) on my plan. Although they seem to have fixed it now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29744347

Many of their plans downscale video, or at least they used to

This is interesting, I don't see how this is possible from a technical sense

If it is an HLS or DASH type of video stream, they could just query the playlist for a smaller video size and throttle that connection so that you're only served the smaller encode vs the full frame highest quality. Pretty simple thing to do really

Identify (by IP or traffic shape) video traffic, then throttle the stream to the desired bitrate. The viewer's player will usually silently adapt.

its trivial with a simple rate limit.

Netflix should have it own set of AS. And after that it's quite simple, routers can do throttle for decades.

I've never experienced this. How would this even work for encrypted (HTTPS) streams?

Even if this were technically feasible, it sounds like a massive infrastructure investment with little to no value. T-Mobile would need to have enough compute and network horsepower to DPI all outbound traffic, intercept every video stream, detect if it's over some resolution threshold, and re-encode it at a lower resolution or bit rate, all in real time.

Throttle video CDN ISP/ASN's

It is in collaboration with certain video providers.

YouTube over mobile for me is downscaled to 720p. In exchange, that doesn’t get counted in my high speed allotment of data.

I can opt out, but then my data can get deprioritized over a certain threshold.

"Downscale" is not quite the right term to use, they just throttle the video CDNs so the streaming platform chooses a lower bandwidth version

On my older plan, they downscale video from some providers to 720, but don’t include that video in my data count.

I can opt out, but then any streaming goes against my high speed data limit.

I think it’s actually a pretty fair trade off.

It’s more due to incompetence than any magnanimity. T-Mobile has a pretty shitty network, with way more local outages and general fuckupitude than the other carriers.

Their focus is speed and density. The other two have much more advanced network management, which as a customer is both good and bad.

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