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Google Fi: Simple Until It's Not
An anonymous reader writes: When Google started Project Fi, one of their big goals was to make cell phone calling simple and predictable. By combining Wi-Fi calling with cellular networks and flat $10/GB pricing, they're trying to put together a service that "just works." But as Dieter Bohn writes, things can get a lot more complicated when you try to integrate it with other Google services, like Voice. He says, "Precisely what happens when you port your number from Voice to Fi (which are kind of the same thing — but not really!) is clear as mud. ... You won't lose your Google Voice number, and it will still do most of the stuff it did before, but you may have to wend your way back to the 2011-era Google Voice site to manage it. Your texts no longer forward via SMS but they're available in the Hangouts App. You can't call people from Google Voice on the web but you can from Hangouts. Oh, and on Android there's a Hangouts dialer app you can use, sometimes, just because."
It's flailing around, trying to find coherence and not finding it.
Use one model.
Use one service. (Fi should be an extension of VOICE...)
Monetize it, but don't do it the way you're currently doing it.
Quit lying to yourselves about you not being a telecom company. You became one with GV and buying up Gizmo5.
The biggest problem is that they want to have their cake and eat it too- and can't reconcile themselves to being a Common Carrier with all that this entails. And...it shows.
I'm using Fi. I can have no phone signal at home which is common and I can make calls through Fi. You don't need hangouts dialer (you need hangouts installed not hangouts dialer), you just use the regular dialer. Text messages and voice work great!
If using the regular phone dialer and text messaging is too difficult for you, then maybe you should not be using a cell service.
First, this IS the testing phase. As long as Google is paying attention to weird interactions within their services, this will likely be ironed out. Second, if this is the biggest problem the service has so far, I submit that it really isn't that bad. Good to know, but not really a big deal to most. On the other hand, if Google wants to be successful in this space, they will need to get this worked out before Project Fi is a generally available thing. Otherwise they really are just flailing about (but artfully).
I'm a developer.
Integrating two different technologies together seamlessly is *extremely difficult*, folks! Roughly 1/3 of the programmers in our company do little more than maintain integration and "bridges" with other vendor products for our clients. They want what we have to offer, and they want it to work with other products, too.
Our database schema is north of 500 tables. Despite having a proper signal/handler based, modular, service oriented architecture, and careful attention to best practices and the willingness to refactor as soon as deemed necessary, keeping all these different parts working together is a *tough job*.
I am not at all surprised that even Google is having trouble integrating their existing voice products with Cell and Wifi. That they are even trying is enough to keep programmers up at night, staring at the ceiling in a state of mild panic.
If they are successful, I will be impressed.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
At 25 Mbit, your "terrible" 1 MB web page takes about 1 second to download. Most of those scripts are then cached, making even your horrible example of a page, in practice, "no big deal".
Apparently, you're part of the problem.
Far too expensive.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
1. Not everyone can even get such speeds in their area. Some people are still on 1Mbps and cellphone networks can seriously slow down depending on tower congestion, etc.
2. Not everyone has 64GB of RAM. Those stupidly huge background images that seem popular at the moment can really waste your RAM and make your computer start swapping like crazy. I have 8GB on my system but I have more running than a browser with a single tab open.
3. A lot of ISPs still impose data caps. It's even worst on mobile where caps are much lower and it's a lot more expensive if you bust them.
4. If you load all that crap on a mobile phone, you get a really slow web page not to mention those huge images are totally wasted on a smaller display.
Saying "No big deal" is part of the problem.
Been using it for a month now as both a Google Voice user and someone who has GV in not-a-gmail-dot-com email address (i.e. my own domain).
Fi won't allow you to use a non-gmail-dot-com email address, period, and this makes things even a bit weirder (and I couldn't really port my GV number to Fi anyway for that reason).
That said, the base service itself runs REALLY well--switching between networks works nearly flawlessly (and there are definite times AT&T drops and TMob kicks in). As the writer of the article states, if you don't use GV (and I'll add do use a @gmail.com address normally), you're golden.
Oh, and you can't forward your GV number to Fi either (I had to forward to a "real" phone, then back to Fi. Works, but kludgy).
They'll get it together and it'll be fine. In the meantime, this early adopter had to jump through some hurdles and that's OK. If you're an existing GV user and can't cope with weird, don't bother with Fi until they get it fixed up.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx