Expecting an American cell plan to work without interruption for extended amounts of time abroad without paying extra for that, or VERY closely checking your contract terms before leaving, is misguided.
From a European perspective, coming to America/Canada is very expensive. You have to have a very fancy phone plan to "freely" roam there, and you'd know about it.
This is a case of poor planning. I'm not sure Fi is the bad organisation here.
>From a European perspective, coming to America/Canada is very expensive. You have to have a very fancy phone plan to "freely" roam there, and you'd know about it.
In France, with a normal subscription, I can roam freely in 3/4 of the world with 25GB of internet without additional charge: https://i.imgur.com/l2bjCz9.png (red parts: unlimited calls + 25GB of data, orange part: 25GB of data but limited calls).
This used to be one of Google Fi's selling points, that you could use it anywhere even for extended periods of time. Now they have shortened their arbitrary limit so it's catching a lot of people by surprise.
I moved my oldest number from Voice to Fi specifically because I was anticipating (and had) several years of international travel in Europe and the Pacific. It worked flawlessly, and now I'm going to find some other offering if I have such plans again (which feels unlikely but you never know about the future).
3. During circumstances like a fucking war happening, if you're making decisions as a company you need to ask the hard questions and create the environment to ask those questions.
Let's stop giving excuses for companies. This is entirely on Google for not communicating and not thinking 5 miles beyond their HQ of the impacts of their shit.
This isn't to say they can't make mistakes. Just that if they do they should learn from them.
FYI "Google Fi" has never allowed more than 6 months abroad and it's never been a selling point for being outside the US for that length of time.
I don't think "Project Fi" was ever clear on what the maximum limit would be until at some point before 2019 (can't find when specifically) they started strictly enforcing a 6 month limit, you can find many Reddit posts at the time of people running in to this issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProjectFi/comments/89w4vp/extended_...
I also think there should be exceptions extenuating circumstance but even if there are significant legal barriers to provide that I think the failure here, as is often the failure with Google Fi, is the lack of communication.
Google Fi has your phone number and they have an app installed on your phone, they have multiple ways they could give you a heads up that your about to hit your abroad limit. Google Fi offers you the ability to pause your service, it would be easy enough to notify you 2 months, 1 month, 2 weeks, 1 week, and then daily that you are about to hit that termination date unless you pause your plan or return to the US. Then you could get a local sim and pause the Google Fi service with ample warning.
FWIW this is reminding me of the bait and switch of gsuite. I'm not talking about the well discussed free tier, more so I'm talking about the fact that Google was pushing so many ads for "Google for your family" around 2012ish. I subscribed to gsuite at the time. Then it turns out I can't actually do any family sharing with it.
Like, why can't I share my YouTube premium with my partner? It's stupid as hell and Google really just ruins my UX with it.
From a European perspective, coming to America/Canada is very expensive. You have to have a very fancy phone plan to "freely" roam there, and you'd know about it.
This is a case of poor planning. I'm not sure Fi is the bad organisation here.