Anyone Using Google Wireless (Project Fi)?

We’ve been with Verizon Wireless for years. When it came time to upgrade our phones we bought them from Verizon and stayed with them (although I delayed upgrading every time by at least a year, sometimes longer). I never bought into the two-year upgrade marketing gravy train. We use our smartphones as real phones ( and texting with the wife and daughter). You know, real communications. We have apps (never pay for any) as a convenience. No games (that’s the reason for a tablet or two). Any photos we take with our phones are managed on our laptops with Photoshop. We don’t even have music on our phones. Real smartphone Luddites.

We’re three years plus into our current phones (Droid Razr Maxx). They continue to function quite well, but in the past six months I’ve detected a definite slowdown in ability. I put on my conspiracy hat here and state I believe planned obsolescence is in play. I know that the internal batteries may have a limited life as well, since we’re recharging perhaps once a day now instead of the typical every five to seven days. (As I said already we use our phones as phones, and little else. We don’t have umbilical cords to our phones like so many others. We use tablets and laptops at home for that. But I digress.)

We’re considering the Google Pixel phones, and along with it Google’s own wireless network (Project Fi). Google doesn’t actually have a wireless network. Instead they partner with three wireless carriers so when using the phone it automatically connects to the best available 4LTE partner network at the moment.

We have no contract with Verizon. It’s month to month. Verizon merely carries over our old plan. Our bill runs around $140 a month for two phones (we have limited minutes and texts that we’ve never exceeded and share 4 GB of data a month that we also have never exceeded). Google’s Project Fi equivalency should run us about $75 a month, but with unlimited minutes, unlimited texts, free hotspots and the same GB usage (but credit for unused GBs).

Anyone using Google’s Project Fi? Your opinion?

I tried it for a few days when they just added U.S. Cellular–but they didn’t have the bugs worked out then for U.S. Cellular so I dropped it. [It didn’t switch to U.S. Cellular properly. I was only interested in their U.S. Cellular coverage. But I expect they have those bugs solved.]

There are a couple useful forums:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/project-fi

I started using it in October with the Google Pixel. I’ve never encountered any problems.

I have been using it for about a year now. My wife and I are paying for the phones with our monthly bill, along with the protection plan which costs $13.29 a month. My usual cost is about $50 a month and I usually use a little over 1 GB a month.

I have liked it, and our costs for the two phones has dropped $40-50 a month. My wife had an issue with her phone, but got a free replacement. I haven’t found any issues with calls or service in general, but as I live in the northeast, coverage is pretty good in general.

I’ve been using Google Fi for about 8 months. I like it a lot. I have the Nexus 5X and it is fine. I don’t know about the Pixel, but I didn’t realize that the 5X doesn’t have a SD card slot. Something to watch out for.

I have wifi at home and at work so I can generally keep my data usage to under 1GB a month. So my monthly charges are around $30. Google Fi works fine with actual phone calls too.