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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

Google Fi can receive all SMS 2 factor messages on Wi-Fi including short codes. It doesn't even require that your phone is on, you can get them in any web browser on any device even if your phone is destroyed. One of my favorite features.

You can get service starting at $20 per month. Fi used to have good service in some mountain areas too, with US Cellular. Not sure what's going on with US Cellular right now though. Some kind of half acquisition by T-Mobile.

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I have been living outside the United States for twelve years.

I always had problems with SMS until I got Google Fi. And that's a problem because, as the article here says, many banks insist on SMS these days. There are various services that give you a virtual number. But they always suffer from one of two problems: (1) VOIP numbers are 'blacklisted' by some banks for security reasons: they want a real cell phone number (2) I simply don't get SMSs in some cases some technical reason

Google Fi works everywhere. Even when there is no cell phone service: it will tunnel over WiFi.

Google shuts off the data on Fi after you've been outside the USA for a month. No problem, I'm happy to pay $25 a month for a 'dataless' connection that gives me SMS and voice.

compared to prices for the rest of the world, you wouldn't want to use Fi for data anyway... just get a local or even "travel" esim and run with dual sims.

I’ve found that it’s easy to data-only eSIM package through an app store app such as Saily, but it’s harder to find a service that gives you a “real” phone number when traveling internationally. Any recommendations?

I don’t have direct experience, but I’ve heard about or seen the following online (there may be many other MVNOs). All of them are activated with an eSIM and they have WiFi calling, which means it’s a real US phone number as any other and you can make/receive calls and send/receive SMS as long as you’re connected to the internet via WiFi or through a data connection on your second SIM on the phone. If you wish, you can buy real roaming too, but that tends to be expensive.

* Tello

* Red Pocket

* Good to Go Mobile

If you’re looking for a real local phone number in the location you’re traveling to, then eSIM providers like Airalo can handle that (Airalo has “global plans” that support voice and SMS). Getting such a connection for voice and SMS, as compared to a data SIM alone, would be expensive. So you could get a data eSIM that works locally and use that for “WiFi” calling/SMS with the providers mentioned above.

>Google shuts off the data on Fi after you've been outside the USA for a month. No problem, I'm happy to pay $25 a month for a 'dataless' connection that gives me SMS and voice.

To be somewhat more specific: while I travel extensively and am in the US often, I am often outside of it for more than a month at a time, and it appears that Google will shut off data outside the US if you use data outside the US for too long. If you are using a different SIM for the primary data connection, it appears that they won't even if you have it enabled as a backup.

I just came back from 3 straight months in the UK with google fi and had mobile data for that entire time.

Perhaps it's country dependent? Or based on other metrics? I wasn't a heavy mobile data user, but didn't intentionally avoid it either...

My comparison here is actually that I've never had it shut off. I'm not quite sure what the criteria are. I do have a friend who had it cut off after a few months of using it for all his data in the EU.

Are you able to use rcs and "messages for web"?

The last time I checked if you wanted "cellphone is off" texting/voice (basically the old hangouts), you had to enable "fi syncing" which disabled rcs features. Is that still true? What url do you goto to do texts/voice? (i see hangouts.google.com redirects to google chat).

Yeah no it still disables RCS which is super lame now that iPhones finally support it. I hope Google gets around to fixing it someday. I'm not holding my breath. I'm just happy they didn't kill the feature when hangouts died. The URL changed, it's now https://messages.google.com/web/

Google Fi charges $10 PER 1GB of data. US Mobile is cheaper and offers the top 3 providers in the US.

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