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Comment by envy2 | Hacker News Reader

If you use large amounts of mobile data, their plans very quickly become obnoxious (throttled after 15GB) and expensive ($80 plus taxes/fees).

Compare that with T-Mobile, who offers $70 a month (including taxes/fees) with throttling at 50GB and 20GB of hotspot data for $15/mo more, or even AT&T or Verizon, and it's more expensive for less service.

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I'm not sure how other people use so much data (besides video). I use whatever I want, and rarely go above 500MB ($5). I made sure to do the offline Google Maps (which I want anyways), and avoid streaming video on phone.

I use offline Google maps (I have ~10 areas since I travel frequently) but still use 600 MB/month of data from that app alone, I'm assuming traffic data.

I'm not sure this is the use case for the majority of Fi users, if they are using a lot of data its going to be cheaper from one of the source carriers than Fi, there is no way Fi could be cheaper than T-Mobile or Sprint who are the Google Fi carriers for heavy data use like this.

Most of the time my phone is on wifi and only using data during travel why pay for anything Im not expecting to use. If I'm off wifi enough where I'm doing a lot of data I'm not using Fi.

> there is no way Fi could be cheaper than T-Mobile or Sprint who are the Google Fi carriers

Look at it as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination. A carrier can charge a lot to their locked-in customers, and sell spare capacity at lower markups to people who have competing alternatives, as long as all not everyone abandons them and moves to Fi.

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