Comment by wting | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wting | Hacker News Reader

For family plans T-Mobile's Simple Choice Plan beats Google Fi in most respects:

- No contract

- Unlimited domestic talk, intl talk from US to ~100 countries

- Competitive intl talk

- Unlimited domestic + intl text

- 2.5GB 4G LTE data

- Unlimited domestic + intl 2G data (128Kbps vs Google's 3G 256Kbps)

- Use any GSM phone, not just Nexus 6

- Phones purchased from T-Mobile come with Wi-Fi calling

Most of my family members portion is $30 / mo. Some higher bandwidth users pay $40 / mo for 4.5GB LTE and data rollover. Our family travels a lot in Asia, having unlimited data / text is really useful.

However Google Fi looks like it's really appealing for low usage, single individual plans.

Look at the name. I think their goal is that most of the time when you're out and about, you're connected to Wi-Fi. I think the cellular partners are a crutch to get them there. If they manage that, you'll wind up paying a lot less than with T-Mobile.

You're right, I missed this on the first pass:

> There are lots of Wi-Fi hotspots out there but not all of them are high-quality. Project Fi automatically connects you to more than a million free, open Wi-Fi hotspots we've verified as fast and reliable. This technology helps keep your speed high and your data bill low.

For low bandwidth users a ~$25 / mo, intl coverage, no contract plan can be really attractive. I'm not sure how wifi coverage or handoff will perform in real life testing, but it's appealing to have Google pressure US telecom companies the same way they did with Google Fiber.

I usually don't have wifi while I am out and about, most stores at least require you to hit accept on their terms and conditions before you can actually connect. Maybe if they showed wifi hotspots on their coverage map I could get behind this idea.

Yeah, I don't know how they do this, but Google says they have pre-approved WiFi hotspots the phone will automatically connect to. From this, I wonder if security will be a concern for some of these hotspots.

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