Google just officially announced its virtual carrier, Google Fi. The pricing:
Project Fi takes a fresh approach to how you pay for wireless, manage your service, and get in touch when you need help. We offer one simple plan at one price with 24/7 support. Here’s how it works: for $20 a month you get all the basics (talk, text, Wi-Fi tethering, and international coverage in 120+ countries), and then it’s a flat $10 per GB for cellular data while in the U.S. and abroad. 1GB is $10/month, 2GB is $20/month, 3GB is $30/month, and so on. Since it’s hard to predict your data usage, you’ll get credit for the full value of your unused data. Let’s say you go with 3GB for $30 and only use 1.4GB one month. You’ll get $16 back, so you only pay for what you use.
The pricing scheme is very interesting, but it’s limited to US Nexus 6 owners for now. It intelligently switches between wifi, T-Mobile, and Sprint.
What it amounts to is, to get the services I currently have (yes all of them) on Google’s MVNO I would pay exactly the same price I do now, for the two crappiest networks in the country. Nice one, Google.
we here in austria too have a virtual carrier that uses the t-mobile net:
https://www.hot.at/tarife.html
their bloody pre-paid plan is cheaper than what google offers!
Indeed :
http://www.prixtel.com/
Unless this is too good to be true, I find yet one more reason to upgrade from my trusty N5 to an N6. 🙂
Which means you probably won’t get service outside of city limits
Depends on the City. Tmobile doesn’t really work in a lot of areas.
Edited 2015-04-22 23:01 UTC
Not even inside them in a lot of cases.
I do not have a mobile phone but $10.00 per 1 GB of data sounds very expensive. On iTunes, Star Wars: A New Hope is 1.96 GB for the SD version and 4.34 GB for the HD version, so does that mean I am looking at $43.00 just to download the HD version or are certain applications exempt from this pricing?
can’t you make such downloads only with plain Wi-Fi, so no charge at all?
I guess “3” customers (EE for work, 3 for play) are spoilt with unlimited data (for me £28/mo on 1 month rolling, sim only; unlimited calls, text too obviously).
And guess their “feel at home” (take your minutes and data abroad) helps too..
Covers all the EU countries I frequent and some-
Australia
Austria
Denmark
Finland
France
Hong Kong
Indonesia
Israel
Italy
Macau
New Zealand
Norway
Republic of Ireland
Spain
Sri Lanka
Sweden
Switzerland
United States
Sorry – not trying to be and advert for 3, but $10/gb is nothing other than awfully expensive – i literally don’t care what the current US state of play is. Sooner customers across the board start pretty much DEMANDING either Unlimited data plans for sensible money(e.g. $40-$60/mo all in including unlimited calls), and perhaps 10-20gb for small money (ie <$20 plans all-in with 200-300 minutes minimum) the better..!
why don’t folk try a little mass action; create a petition for (e.g. verizon) your network’s other customers – and politely demanding more generous yet sensible allowances or leave en masse. (i know contracts can’t easy be left, but perhaps also offer your collective custom to another provider if they cover the exit fees) – at least they’d squirm a bit if you managed to get it up to a few 100,000 /million? signatories.. 😉
Edited 2015-04-22 22:19 UTC
I just got back from Italy and O2 gave me unlimited data and reasonable priced calls/SMS for £1.99 a day. Given that I used a tonne of data, I’ve pretty happy with that.
Just because it is from Google? Because we are hoping this will be available worldwide and on all devices soon?
10 dollar per GB is NOT an interesting price point, except when you use the “abroad” option a lot. And even then you are much better of buying a SIM with a (couple of) GB at the airport.
“it’s limited to US Nexus 6 owners for now” and this expensive? Is this a joke?
I’d love for someone to run a Netalyzr Test on it: http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/index.html
Mobile Data Plans are often riddled with filtering, terrible delays, filtering, hidden proxies, filtering, DNS MITM, etc.
One example is this. This is called a so called Safe Starter sold by Orange in Poland, executed on an LTE connection:
http://n1.netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/summary/id=43ca253f-26024-14d2…
I don’t see how this is worth it at all. Now, if it were T-Mobile and Verizon, that’d be different, but Sprint?
T-Mobile has good coverage in many areas, mostly cities, but terrible coverage in the more rural less dense areas. Sprint, well, everyone I know on Sprint, even in dense population areas, has problems where calls just fade out mid-sentence, if they can reliably get a call going in the first place.
Verizon mostly works in a lot of areas, but I’ve noticed smart phones are unreliable in rural areas where you might only get 1x service.
In short they all have problems, but at the price point the Google service is coming in at, I’d rather keep my T-Mobile or Verizon service. There’s just not enough savings (if any) to change IMO.
[I pay for service on both T-Mobile and Verizon.]