Google’s Project Fi now caps data bills at $60 | Hacker News Reader

Google’s Project Fi now caps data bills at $60

techcrunch.com

78 pointsbaus78 comments

I just switched to Project Fi this month. The service has been totally acceptable and the support has been really helpful. Before today's announcement I found myself constantly checking the Project Fi app to see how much data I had used, something I never did on my old provider. This change is much appreciated. I'm especially a fan of them simply rolling this out, no need to opt in. The only way I would know of improved plan options on my old provider was by having a conversation with a sales rep after a support call. I do wish the price per gig was slightly cheaper but I'm comfortable with the increased cost for the improvement of service.

This is my case too. Switching 5 phones for my family over to Google Fi. So far it's been excellent. I too was checking my data in the Project Fi app. Happy to not have to do that anymore.

Also worth noting is that you now "post-pay" for the data you used at the end of the billing cycle instead of pre-paying. I know that it works out roughly the same, but it always struck me as unnecessarily complex that I had to guess how much data I would use, get billed for that, then get refunded for what I didn't use.

Agreed, that was always weird. I suppose the point was to allow for data usage alert push notifications so you don't end up with a surprise large bill at the end of the billing cycle.

This. I upped my amount just to avoid the messages.

The cap at $60 is a really nice addition. I've had lots of people want to go to Fi but as heavy data users they just couldn't.

FYI they will throttle users down to 256kbps if an individual user goes above 15G.

https://support.google.com/fi/answer/6201699

But you can go back to full speed at the $10/GB rate again.

I may have missed my chance to participate in this discussion, but this is the part I didn't understand.

Does this mean that when 1 phone goes past 15GB, it is necessary to opt-out of the cap to return to normal speeds?

If not (and it doesn't make sense if opting out of the cap is somehow possible), is there ever any case where someone would _not_ want to go back to the normal speed as they cross the 15GB on the way to passing the cap?

Is the intention just to throw in a minor speed bump requiring the affected 1% of users to contact support every month (leaving the few that are ignorant throttled)?

Great question. If I remember I'll reply somewhere in a month, I'll try to go past the 15GB mark by then. Opting out of the cap would make this useless for me.

But if you were reimbursed by an employer upto $X and that's what you want to spend, not going to normal speed starts to make sense.

This is great. I just don't understand why mobile plans are so expensive in the US. When I traveled to Israel I bought a local sim with no contract. It's about $15/month for 10GB plus unlimited text/calls. They don't even offer there plans with 2GB data, it's 10GB or more.

US providers are expected to provide national coverage, in a country that has a much wider spread of population, while also being approximately the size of Europe. It's not exactly an easy area to cover.

Cellphone towers minimize the impact of density. Lower density and you can use fewer towers. The limit is one cellphone tower within 45 miles of you or 1 tower per ~6,000 square miles as they can have up to 45 mile radious ^ 2 * pi - overlapping area. Continual US is only 3 million square miles or ~500 cellphone towers. You do need significantly more towers for various reasons, but towers only run 250,000$ aka ~150 million to cover US own. However it's really spectrum and city's that are expensive not empty land.

In the UK, Three provides nationwide coverage + free roaming in 71 other nations (including USA)[0] for as little as £13/month for 4 GB of data.

[0] http://www.three.co.uk/feel-at-home

[1] http://www.three.co.uk/Store/SIM/Plans_for_phones

On EE I’m currently getting unlimited texts/calls and 30GB of data (with roaming in EU and US) for £17.99/month (~$25/month). Makes US prices look crazy.

Three's coverage is garbage outside the big cities (and sometimes garbage in them!), and Feel At Home is never 4G.

Everything except Verizon is garbage in rural America.

They have a clause in the fine print, that says that you have to be in your home country at least once a month, in order to use this service. I thought it was great for me staying abroad for 6 months, but I could only use it for a little more than the first.

For 15$ at my operator I've got two numbers sharing the same unlimited text, unlimited sms/MMS plan with 30 GB of data. Actually it's 15$ max, if I use less I pay less. The "contract" that I have can be withdrawn with a month's notice and that's a standard service, so paying $60 for 6GB sounds extremely expensive.

> $15/month for 10GB plus unlimited text/calls

I just don't understand why mobile plans are so expensive in Israel. In India you can get 1.5GB per day plus unlimited text/calls for $6 a month. If I had to speculate, I'd say it has something to do with competition lowering prices.

I moved from Project Fi to Mint Sim and could not be happier. Project Fi forces you to call over wifi if your phone supports it, and constantly is swapping cell providers to find the cheapest. Even mid call.

Probably 50% of my phone calls either dropped or had huge latency as a result.

I used to be on Project Fi, but it had the negative side effect of making me always equate data usage to money. e.g. "Watching this YouTube video will probably cost $0.50. Is it worth it?" This resulted me in using ~2GB of data, which was a $40 phone bill. I switched to a T-Mobile 10GB plan for $50/mo (unlimited 3G data after 10GB), and I couldn't be happier.

Are you in the USA? I pay about $115/mo for 5 lines after the Kickback rebates, and that includes Netflix. Modern plans don't throttle until something like 23GB in a month.

Using this story to ask: is poor voice-call quality common with Fi? I'm using a Nexus 6P. This is my first smartphone and I'm totally happy with the device and Project Fi for browsing, apps, texting, and tethering. But for plain voice calls the latency, dropouts, and "underwater" sounds are significantly worse than with my old prepaid feature phone, even when I see a strong signal. I had hoped that voice quality would get better (closer to Skype) when I bought a leading smartphone. I don't know if I should blame the service or the device. It's worse than laptop VOIP over DSL, my POTS voice line, or even a cheap feature phone circa 2010.

This was my experience as well with Project Fi. Good data, bad voice. T-mobile and ATT based MVNOs have typically given me better voice service.

It could depend what network you are on behind the scenes. There are special codes you can use to switch networks if you are in an area covered by more than one.

In general, cell quality voice should be similar to that of a POTS line. Better codecs can provide higher quality for VoIP, even on small bandwidth, but with "real" phones you are going to get the lowest common denominator.

One test would be to use gHangouts, Duo, Wire, etc. to make a voice call instead of the dialer app (so that you could compare voice-as-data with a regular call).

I wonder if this new policy affects international data usage at all. I've been sticking with Project Fi largely due to how seamless the data roaming experience has been for me.

In the article it does say: The bill protection feature includes international data (which is always included) and also applies to data-only plans for laptops, tablets and cars.

I pay $240 a month for 5 voice lines with "unlimited data" and one data only line for my iPad with T-mobile. They also throw in a Netflix subscription in with it that I was paying for separately so really it's $230. It has 2G international data roaming included in most places and 4G roaming in Mexico and Canada. Finally it has unlimited 3G tethering (that's good enough in a pinch).

They don't throttle your dada over a certain limit but you do get deprioritized during times of network congestion. My son who doesn't live with us uses his phone for internet exclusively and he does 80GB+ a month without a noticeable slow down. My wife has a split shift and between her shift, when she's not at the gym, she watches about two or three hours of streaming video a day.

I haven't had a problem with T-mobile except in very rural areas but that doesn't happen often at all.

I live in a US state capital city for part of the year and Google Fi only offers 2G coverage there. Otherwise I'd have a new Pixel 2 XL and pods on the way and be like AT&T who?

I wonder how this will impact Project Fi data-only SIMs[1] I have toyed with the idea of switching to Fi to pop one of those into my Mikrotik router as a 'plan B' if my fiber connection drops (not that I would want to run all my traffic over it for long...).

1: https://support.google.com/fi/answer/6330195?hl=en

Honestly for me this wont matter. I typically only spend 40$ a month $20 talk/text then $20 data. I also find the fine print interesting.

>"If you use more than 15GB of data in a month (under 1% of current fi users you'll expect slower data speeds with Bill Protection"

So with Bill Protection you get throttled, but if you pay then you don't... Interesting.

I take it to mean you don't pay from 6-15 GB, and then pay onwards, if you want to avoid throttling.

So, you still benefit $90, while getting the same quality service if you want to pay the old prices. 15 GB/month really seems like a lot, though, coming from someone who uses 1, maybe 2 GB, with Fi.

Seems like a fair scheme with few downsides.

Definitely nice to know that my bill cannot go higher than $80/month even with some type of data usage run-away (look at you YouTube Kids!).

FWIW, my Virgin Mobile plan costs $60 a month and isn't slowed until 23 gigabytes. Their unlimited plans for new customers are $50 per month.

As much as Google touts the "flexibility" to theoretically pay less, using less than 6 gigabytes is pretty difficult in 2018 unless you use very few services and have no interest in video.

It's not difficult if you're on wifi for the majority of the time.

For me the best two parts about Fi when I was using it was the free extra data sims and the fact that you could roam data internationally for no extra charge. I'm abroad ~6 times per year so not having to pay out the nose in extra charges or spend time walking around a new city looking for a sim card the first day of my trip made it worthwhile. The actual comparison with other providers from a monthly data cost perspective were kind of a wash

Eventually left when I wanted to switch back to an iPhone

It's two of us on my plan and the combined usage rarely goes above 4GB. We look at videos a lot, but most of that happens on WiFi. Most of my data is used by Chrome, followed by gReader. Occasionally, Maps spikes when I'm in a new area or abroad. For the other user, it's often Google Play Music streaming radios while driving.

that said, i average around 1 gig a month, so i suspect some of this is usage patterns - I am in wifi the vast majority of the time.

Interesting. I almost never break the 1GB mark.

I rarely go over 2 GB a month. What are you doing to use so much? Or are you on a group plan?

Google Maps everyday and streaming music and sometimes video. That's enough to cross 2GB trivially unless you are on something like T-Mobile that does not consider major audio-video streaming sites against their data cap.

If you're using Google Maps every day, you offline your area within the app. Drastically reduces data usage.

Shouldn't Google Maps be caching this data?

Offline maps allows you to save all of the streets in a large radius, the size of a medium-size city. You can also save an area in advance, such as if you're going to an area on a trip.

Caching just saves the streets you get routed on, after the face.

> unless you are on something like T-Mobile that does not consider major audio-video streaming sites against their data cap

Isn't it odd that people don't raise their placards against this example of network non-neutrality?

The reason that breaking net neutrality is a problem is that it allows the carriers to pick winners and losers based on special deals and makes it harder for new entrants. T-mobile doesn't require payment from the video/audio providers and doesn't discriminate. You just have to follow their documented guidelines, have legal content, and sign up with them.

They even have one porn site at least (evidence they aren't discriminating based on content). But they don't advertise it.

In other words, they may be breaking the letter of the concept of Net Neutrality but not the spirit.

Isn't it odd that people don't raise their placards against this example of network non-neutrality?

Isn't this the main complaint about network non-neutrality? That ISPs get to pick winners and losers in the streaming space based on the deals they make with the big players.

Do you opportunistically use Wi-Fi? Or just LTE all the time?

I have WiFi on when I am at home or work. When I am outdoors I often force it off because it ends up connecting to weak signals that are not actually useful and basically causes the phone to not 'see' any internet.

I hate this. there should be a feature that ignores weak signals beyond the whitelisted ones. whenever I turn off the wifi to ignore the weak signal, I wind up forgetting to turn it back on, racking up gigs of data in the process.

This has happened more times than I care to keep count. Everything considered crossing 2GB in a month is extremely normal for me

I admit I am pretty uninterested in ever watching video on a phone screen. But I use tons of navigation, streaming music, etc on my phone, and rarely exceed a couple of gigs. Because it's on wifi at home and at work.

Does that include international coverage?

The best part about Google Fi is that you can use it everywhere for the same price. Even in China!

Question, why are mobile phone contracts in the US so expensive? In the UK I pay £17/month for 4G, unlimited data, and free roaming in a whole bunch of countries (including US). Anecdotally, when I roam in the US the speed is faster than my SO who lives there.

UK is anomalously cheap (e.g. compared to other European countries)

We have four networks who are all colluding to keep the price up, presumably by the gas-station effect rather than annual meetings of the Cell Price Setting Conspiracy.

T-mobile has better plans than this though the deals keep on changing. My current family plan works out to $30/person in my family for 4G unlimited voice/messaging and 20GB data. They do have a unlimited data plan but I hardly ever exceed 5GB myself. Also I get roaming into Canada/Mexico. And messaging/data when traveling abroad (no voice for free abroad.)

I switched to Project Fi as I'm always doing International Roaming. The Fi data is the same cost internationally as domestically. This is a really killer feature if you're on the road a lot.

When can I use an iPhone on Project Fi?

You can right now - but you do need to activate on a compatible phone. You can then swap in an iPhone. It'll function fine, with some features missing (MMS, Carrier Swapping) missing. I use a Project Fi data SIM in an iPhone as a secondary device.

Yep, this is true. Currently typing this on an iPhone SE with Project Fi. For MMS, I highly recommend using Hangouts (particularly for voicemail). But otherwise, I use iMessages. I have been doing this for the past year, it’s been working smoothly.

One of the big features of ProjectFi is the worldwide roaming, and we can't get that on an iPhone from what I've seen. MMS via Hangouts is nice though.

The worldwide roaming works too. You just need to set the APN correctly. APN is something like h2g2.

Whoa. Thank you!

Probably never. As a 6P user on Fi since it left beta, it seems to be built to lock you in to the Nexus/Pixel/Google ecosystem.

And if it hasn't changed, the OS supposedly also has to be stock to allow for Fi to work.

See above. You are capable of using Project Fi with an iPhone, with a few drawbacks of course.

Technically it will work now in many (but not all) ways.

Project Fi is a non-starter for anyone who relies on their phone for critical functions such as telephone service. Phone numbers are still king, and losing mine as a result of some spurious Google account deletion would result in calls from my child's school being met with dead silence.

So do you have an actual example of this happening with Project Fi?

I’m in Portugal right now, and my partner, who just recently switched to Fi, has no access to her previous google voice number, and her main number (and Fi service in general) has been on and off. Several people have complained they can’t reach her.

I guess the previous poster was referring to losing a number permanently, but still. Seems like they are still ironing out basic services like phone numbers.

When you switch to Fi you have the option of moving your google voice number to a different account.

When you leave Fi you have the option of moving your original number back to a traditional carrier.

Or, at least that's how it worked in 2016 when I tried Fi.

In Europe, I pay $20 for unlimited mobile data at 100mbps.

How "unlimited" is that? Could you use 1TB/month? 10T? More?

No more than around 33TB/month, I bet!

How much does that cost if you roam outside of Europe?

what's your income tax %?

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