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Comment by tristor | Hacker News Reader

Google Fi is great if you never leave the US. If you spend more than 30 days outside the US, you can be penalized due to roaming, even though they have a similar offer/capability to T-Mobile for data roaming. On top of that, it's tied to your Google account, which comes with all the drama that means like the recent story about Google arbitrarily shutting everything off (including Google Fi) for the guy who took photos for his doctor.

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I spent quite literally half the last year outside of the US and suffered no such penalty. I have their unlimited plan and everything worked just fine. I don't make many calls, but when I do if you're outside of US/MX/CAN you can do so over wifi for free and my data worked fine.

Most of my time was in South America, I can't speak for overseas if this is the same.

I have never really had complaints about Google-Fi.

I'm glad to hear this. I was a digital nomad for some time, and at the time Google Fi and T-Mobile were basically the only real options for international roaming long-term, and so I associated with a lot of folks on Google Fi and it was commonplace for folks to get penalized for spending a long-time outside the US. At the time, I had an 18 month stretch outside the US on T-Mobile with no issues. Maybe they've gotten better about this.

Not sure how long ago this was for you, but I do know I've received a few notifications from them over the past couple years about how they've updated/changed stuff around international travel/roaming. So it may be quite a bit better than whenever this was.

I also spend about half every year as a digital nomad.

You got lucky. They terminated my data for "being outside the US for too long". It was a crappy experience since the whole advertisement is about the international roaming being the same price as the (overpriced) US data.

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