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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
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.
> What is the benefit? The "roll-over" data?
You use lots of data. You are not the target market.
Last year I had a data plan. I used about 20MB of cellular data per month, because I am almost always near wifi. I stopped paying for data. Paying an extra $30 per month for a Gigabyte of data (98% of which I do not use) was stupid. This plan is for me.
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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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
Who are Project Fi's cellular network partners?
Project Fi has partnered with Sprint and T-Mobile, two of the leading carriers in the US, to launch our service. You can view our US coverage at fi.google.com/coverage.
that it's all just data. It's absurd the way carriers have been pretending voice and data are somehow different.