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Comment by kylecazar | Hacker News Reader

I remember when it was released and I wished I was in Kansas.

I'm smack in the middle of debating Google Fi, this probably won't impact my decision, but I wonder if it will suffer a similar fate.

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I'll be sad when Google Fi is eventually killed. It's honestly amazing to have a service that's purely transactional. No notifications, no upsells, no "oops we had a data breach" (except the time it happened upstream), no roaming. Just a monthly payment exchanged for service.

How is this different from what other prepaid carriers like Mint offer?

The big thing keeping me from switching from Google Fi is how easy international roaming is. For every country I've been to, I've just had it automatically work within ten minutes of landing, at my regular price, without buying any addons

Except if you happen to travel for more than 45 days, in which case Google Fi will promptly tell you to get fucked and cut off your service without warning, advanced notice, or spelling out anywhere when you sign up. Not my idea of a carrier I can trust. I deleted my account and service with them to move to a carrier that I can trust and actually respects me as a customer.

What service do you use now?

I've switched to US Mobile. I haven't used it on an extended basis internationally yet, but I am about to travel internationally, so will find out soon. That said, the reviews are pretty good by people that use it internationally for an extended period of time.

tbf, that was because a lot of people abused it by being permanently outside of the US and relying exclusively on the roaming for all their data. I know because I was one of those people for 6 years.

Gee, thanks.

We've exceeded that by months on multiple occasions and fully expected them to cut us off after reading similar dire warnings but they never have.

That said, we keep data usage rather low because we're on the metered plan.

I don't know what the difference is, but the first time I exceeded that they chopped me off immediately.

I got bad speed even with perfect signal in malls and any place that is more crowded than a Costco. Google Fi doesn't have that problem. I blame it on T-mobile but I would rather Google Fi survives.

Fi’s customer service has long since turned to shit, but the things keeping me on it are the data sims, simple international roaming, and international calling. That trifecta is pretty hard to find a match for. Especially the data sims. But if you don’t need that, I probably wouldn’t recommend Fi. My wife had endless trouble with multiple bad sim cards and the customer service experience was just as dreadful as every other carrier.

I left fi because the service was bad outside of Metro areas and didn't trust them to not arbitrarily shut down. It felt stagnant as a service which implied it was coasting along with no one at the helm

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