What is Project Fi

Project Fi is a pre-paid service, which concentrates on simple and cheaper billing of a data, which you use on your phone. Project Fi belongs to Google, more specifically under their new branch Alphabet. You pre-pay data, get a sim card and a software into your phone. With Project Fi, your phone will switch between the data availability from T-Mobile and Sprint and further your phone will automatically switch between free available Wi-Fi, therefore making the billing cheaper. The phone will automatically switch between those while you are calling without any interaction of the phone call. Google has made available to sign up since beginning of March for the service called Project Fi. 10 months ago this service has been only available based on invite and nowadays is available in US though an easy sign up. You also receive one new phone number to which you can link all of your devices and forward all of your calls and texts from other phones.

Pricing

The pricing of the service seems quite revolutionary compare to other mobile data providers. You have to pre-pay the data before hand; you start with 10 USD per gigabyte of data and 20 USD per month which includes unlimited calling, texting, international text and you can use your phone as a hotspot. As one of the main advantages Google lists that you never know how much data you will use per month, therefore you have to prepay and then at the end of the month a money is returned to you in case you haven’t used up all of the data. Also the software allows for high customisation, therefore when users travel a lot, Project Fi works in 120 countries already and costs the same all around the world, so you do not have to pay any extra for pricey roaming. You can customise daily how much data you want to continue for the rest of the month with using simple app and at the end of the month you receive 1 cent per megabyte of data, which was not used.

Limitations and benefits

So far the limitations of the Project Fi are that it only works on Nexus 6P, Nexus 5X or Nexus 6. Also this service is so far only available for US phones and some parts of US offer very low speed of the Internet.

On the other hand we can hope that availability of this service will grow worldwide because it offers revolution in pricing of mobile data and solves the problem of roaming which phone companies and government regulations are unable to solve for many years. Not only the coverage abroad but also the possibility to receive money back after not fully using all the data seems like very logical and revolutionary step in the data billing.

References:

https://fi.google.com/about/network/

You can now sign up for Google’s Project Fi cell service without an invite