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Google Launches Project Fi Mobile Phone Service
An anonymous reader writes: Google unveiled today a new cell phone service called Project Fi. It offers the same basic functionality as traditional wireless carriers, such as voice, text and Internet access, but at a lower price than most common plans. From the article: "Google hopes to stand out by changing the way it charges customers. Typically, smartphone owners pay wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon a bulk rate for a certain amount of data. Google says it will let customers pay for only what data they use on their phones, from doing things like making calls, listening to music and using apps, potentially saving them significant amounts of money. For now, the program is invite-only and will only be available on Google's Nexus 6 smartphone."
$50 a month to match my son's BoostMobile plan, except he still gets data (at 2G speeds) after he exceeds his limit, and pays $40/month.
Come on, Google, you used to be cool.
Google should just buy Sprint and T-Mobile, merge their networks to optimize their coverage footprints and backhaul and then sell this plan to anyone and any device.
This plan is reasonable for calling and texts, but the data prices are way too high.
If I were to switch to this plan I'd be paying 4x as much per month than I am currently (@30GB/mo T-mobile unlimited everything = $80, Google fi = $320). The wifi hotspot thing wouldn't help much either since I don't spend much time in range of any publicly accessible networks.
Knowledge Brings Fear
I pay ~$45 for unlimited everything (throttled after 3GB) using Net10.
Using Google Fi I would pay roughly the same amount ($50).
What is the benefit? The "roll-over" data?
Not trolling, I'm legitimately curious.
The plan is $20 month, plus $10 per gig of data. Not sure where or how you got $50 out of that. If you regularly used more than 3G/month three are better 'bulk' plans available. But if you have busy and low months and need to scale to 3G occasionally this works out. To quote: "Our plan starts with the Fi Basics for $20 per month. This includes: Unlimited domestic talk and text Unlimited international texts Low-cost international calls Wi-Fi tethering Coverage in 120+ countries Then it's $10 per GB for data. $10 for 1GB, $20 for 2GB, $30 for 3GB and so on. That's it. With no annual contract required." You COULD spend $50 if you use 3G of data every month. But you don't HAVE to spend $50. It's $20.
Man, when the first post fails basic math, the rest of the thread is pretty useless. Don't believe everything you read on the internet kids!
One plus is the ability to tether. I have to pay an extra $50 a month with Verizon for a jet pack. This would cut that out entirely.
wish it will support Apple iPhone, probably not going to happen. lol
And Republic let's you switch plans at will. So I can go with the $10/mo plan with no data and the second I need data I can do an on-the-fly switch to $25 or $40 for the month to get up to 5GB unthrottled 3G or 4G cellular wireless respectively, then switch back to $10/mo for the next month when I have no need of that data.
I have co-workers with both sprint and tmobile. They get no service here, yet google's coverage map shows the best possible coverage....WTF?
without the NEXT charges my bill is around $220 for 6 lines on the account. google would be $120 plus the data plus being limited to one choice of phone
This deal is good for some people, not good for others. If you think it'll work for you, sign up, if you don't, then don't. It seems more than a bit of a stretch to proclaim that the plan is a colossal failure because it does not meet your particular needs.
For somebody regularly near Wi-Fi (and therefore a low user of data), it's a pretty good plan, with only $20/mo for the unlimited T&T, and data that is reasonably priced if you don't use that much of it.
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it is not advertised, but you can still get in Sprint Framily plan if you know your way. It costs $25 for 1GB or $45 for unlimited data with no contract. This plan allows roaming, so while the coverage is not on par with Verizon, it is still much better than with any prepaid carriers.
The one thing I miss [on a Republic Wireless talk and text only plan] is not having [data] in my car because I can't just check slashdot or whatever while driving but really, that's a good thing.
In other words, the Republic Wireless plan that you describe is more suited for people who drive than for people who use public transit. Someone who takes the bus to and from work goes by open Wi-Fi hotspots so fast that the device doesn't even have a chance to associate, let alone present and allow the user to submit the "I agree to the terms" page.
If you want to boast about being a new cheap alternative, at least do some shopping of what your competitors are offering.
I pay about 13 bucks for my wifes cell on republic wireless, she uses the wifi portion mostly and if she needs 3g she can toggle it on and get charged for when she uses it.
I'll just leave this here. https://republicwireless.com/plans/
If Google were to buy both Sprint and T-Mobile, then it wouldn't matter which phone the customer brings. In areas that lack LTE coverage, CDMA2000 phones would work on Sprint, and GSM/UMTS phones would work on T-Mobile.
The problem with the rollover is that my son listens to Pandora... and often hits his cap every month.
For the price of 24 GB of cellular data, you could just buy 200 singles on Google Play Music, transcode them to 128 kbps Vorbis, and load them onto the device over MTP or Wi-Fi. They'll occupy about 1 GB of the phone's storage.
Republic Wireless effectively does the same thing as this, for less money, with less expensive phones, MotoX|G|E. As of May 18th, RW is starting a test of allowing users to customize his or her plan and refund unused data. $25/mo with 5GB of data. I'd rather support them instead of Google, too.
How does this not fly in the face of net-neutrality? This is a per-usage fee. Sure, there's no fee back to the content provider, and I'm aware that mobile carriers have some exemptions to traditional wire-based ISP's, but this seems like an move from Google. Moreover, this sounds like any old pay-per-data plan mobile providers have floated/attempted in the past. What is new here?
if you are buying an unlocked Nexus 6 @ $650 you aren't worrying about the phone bill.
Can't tell you how many times my coworkers, who have limited data but know I have unlimited data, have asked me while we're out and about if I could google something, or ask me to turn on my wifi hotspot.
There is a definite and obvious use case for unlimited or very cheap data when "anywhere" (where my specific definition of "anywhere" means, typically, on the road, or at any number of random retail establishments or private office complexes in the Baltimore metro area / suburban sprawl). Landline-backed WiFi is rarely available, and where it is, it's not free, or too slow to be useful.
The telcos can give us excuses all day about why we can't have unlimited or very cheap data, but eventually they're going to have to figure it out. There is a ridiculous amount of pent-up demand for cheap cellular data, or any alternative that gives you instant broadband-speed data at your fingertips almost anywhere. WiFi, WiMax, and all the other alternatives that have tried to be it, have utterly failed to come even close because of a lack of coverage. The only alternative we have today is grandfathered unlimited on Verizon & AT&T if you need tethering, or Sprint/T-Mo if you don't need tethering.
No, $10/GB is not insanely cheap. $0.10 per GB is closer to the order of magnitude I'm willing to pay, with $0.01 as the ideal. I think the telcos haven't unlocked pricing on this level for the masses because they're too busy swimming in their $10 bills, not because there is an engineering brick wall that would prevent them from doing this.
I have nothing against paying by the gigabyte. I'm not at all married to the idea of unlimited. I just refuse to accept paying such an outlandish fee for a gigabyte of data, when 1 GB is almost nothing with today's content-rich web apps (auto-playing 1080p videos, images, huge .js applications, etc.) In fact, some websites can easily make you spend $1 or more in a couple seconds by just visiting a company's homepage, and while the page is rendering and you're fumbling around trying to tap the close button, you've downloaded more than 100 MB of video, and spent upwards of a dollar. Not cool, but it happens.
I think, to determine the price per gigabyte, we should back into it by determining a reasonable price for one second of saturated average throughput (SAT), which should be set to the expected downstream you'd get if you're downloading at "saturation speed" (as fast as the LTE modem can go with the current bandwidth available) for one second.
For Verizon LTE, SAT would currently be something like 20 Mbps. So that means you would be downloading 20 Megabits in one second. To download one gigabyte, you would have to download continuously at 20 Mbps for 400 seconds. If we set our one-second SAT target price at $0.0001, this means you could currently charge $0.04 per gigabyte, which I think is a great price.
However, the price per gigabyte should go down the higher the bandwidth. The goal is to prevent any one second of SAT from costing too much. So if they doubled the LTE bandwidth to 40 Mbps SAT, to maintain our target one-second price of $0.0001, we'd have to charge $0.02 per gigabyte. By measuring the user's bill according to what we consider to be a reasonable price for 1 second of SAT, the carriers will be adjusting the price per gigabyte to be lower and lower the more bandwidth is available. This is something consumers want (and need) to see.
Compare this to the current model, where 1 GB of data has been the same since 3G days. Even though we have many times more bandwidth and capacity on the mobile networks than we used to in 2003, we're still billing customers $10 per GB. That, I think, is completely unreasonable. The only reason this has happened is that the carriers are trying to get their customers into the hundred-millions, so they're dividing their limited resources by a great deal more handsets than they had on the network in 2003. I don't agree with this model one bit. It means that us early adopters are now effectivel
Maybe I am interpreting the article incorrectly, but from what I understand, the smart phone will use the 4G network of Sprint and T-Mobile. What will the phone do when 4G service is not available? I assume that the phone will fall back to 3G GSM and/or EVDO. So, will the smartphones have bot GSM or EVDO, or even CDMA 1xRTT capability? Both? Neither?
Some places that I visit do not have 4G service. I actually bought an old $50 3G phone instead of a Nexus 6.
Thats fine if you don't use very much data but $45 for unlimited is a much better deal. I use about 2.5 -3.5 GB month depending on how much I'm driving and if I'm using it for GPS a lot. My wife and son on the other hand 5-8 GB month facebook, games, skype it adds up fairly quickly.
I don't want a new phone, so the plan is a non-starter right there.
But the pricing seems more of a shot across the bow of ATT&T and Verizon. TMobile, and other MVNOs can be cheaper at some levels, but this has the weight of Google behind it. For better and for worse Google is flexing it's muscles in the ISP arena. Google Fiber really is causing changes with AT&T and Comcast. I see this as that - you'll never get Google Fiber/Google FI in every home every phone, but it makes people realize there are other things out there.
T-Mobile already beats this except in coverage. The only way this even makes any sense at all is that it combines T-Mobile with Sprint, which gives more coverage.
I have one of those free Obama phones. It's a dumb phone, yes, and I get free minutes every month. Currently because of the plan I choose, I have over 5000 mins stacked up.
I'm guessing the google plan isn't for me, since I need a Nexus 6 and I have a crappy dumb fucking phone that sounds like shit.
I need a better phone.
Anyways, I like what google is doing here. If I didn't have a free phone and had a Nexus 6, I'd love to get on it. But alas, I don't.
Be seeing you...
i can get better data plains from the carriers its based off. like metro pcs 60$ no data cap. i know why its hi sprint does charge stupid prices for there data plains and its even worse when its a 3rd party buying it.
that it's all just data. It's absurd the way carriers have been pretending voice and data are somehow different.
Ting has been doing this for years and is a great company.
Sure use Goog and then not only is the NSA recording my calls and all data I use but Goog will have a copy for them to use too.
Just think then Goog will also have copies of all your dick pics
And for the ladies they will have a copy of your pretty shaved pink that you sent your boy friend.
it's been said, that if you aren't paying, you are the product. Seems Google knows some are wise to this, and found a way to get people both paying AND being the "product".