Ask Paul: June 24 (Premium)

Happy Friday! And welcome to an epic edition of Ask Paul with some great reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.
Google Fee Fi Fo Fum
Lots of Google Fi questions today. Let’s dig in.

drewtx asks:

Google Fi. Why do you only use it when you are traveling, rather than just staying on it permanently (even when you’re home)?

I actually only use Google Fi again, after two years of using Mint Mobile. But the reasoning for switching from Fi to Mint was simple enough: Mint Mobile is considerably less expensive than Google Fi. But coincidental to this change in early 2022, the pandemic hit and so I wasn’t traveling, internationally or otherwise. So Mint Mobile made sense.

When travel opened up again in 2021, I do move to a system where I used Google Fi only when traveling internationally. The idea here is simple enough: you can “sleep” a Google Fi account for months at a time and not pay for it, so I’d only use (and pay for) the service when I needed it.

So why did I switch back to Google Fi earlier this year? Two reasons: convenience (it’s nice dealing with one phone number and one SIM/eSIM, and I got into weird issues with text messages while traveling) and I knew I’d be traveling internationally a lot more this year and going forward, and so it seemed worth the additional cost.

Not looking for a detailed cost benefit analysis of Fi - just curious why you don’t use it permanently

Check that second link above if you do want a detailed cost-benefit analysis. I looked at the cost of Google Fi over several months and compared it to the cost of Mint Mobile. It wasn’t even close: I cut my bill in half.

I am using iPhone (an aging but still viable XR) and Fi has some limitations on iOS. In the US it will not roam networks; it stays on TMO - but that was my previous provider so no significant problem there. Also, when traveling overseas The Fi+iOS combo does not support tethered or WiFi hotspot.

Hm. I definitely used a Wi-Fi hotspot in Mexico off of Google Fi before our cable Internet was installed, but as I think about this now, I’m wondering if I didn’t do so via my Google Pixel 6 Pro, as it has a Google Fi data SIM. These are free, but as I’m looking at that page I linked to, it says that tethering from a device with a data-only SIM isn’t supported. And now I’m not sure what to say.

So I looked it up. I did tether for a day, and wrote about that in What I Use: Mexico City, May 2022 (Premium): “I only used the Pixel for a few moon/distant photos, and to tether my laptop at the apartment the day before our Internet was connected.” So it definitely worked via the data-only SIM, despite Google’s support note. The screenshot in that article shows all the data I used that day. (I don’t recall if I tried this on the iPhone first, but I bet I did.)

jt5 asks:

I am thinking of switching to Google Fi. I noticed that Google says it is still in beta for the iPhone. From what I...