{"id":11200,"date":"2017-03-12T14:27:37","date_gmt":"2017-03-12T21:27:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/?p=11200"},"modified":"2017-04-16T11:24:03","modified_gmt":"2017-04-16T18:24:03","slug":"project-fi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/project-fi\/","title":{"rendered":"International Data with Google Project Fi on an iPhone"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ProjectWhen Mike Elgan, (the digital nomad) came on Chit Chat Across the Pond<\/a> to talk about how he works and lives all over the world, of course we talked about how he uses technology to do this. If you haven’t listened to CCATP episode #456 from September, it’s a fascinating discussion.<\/p>\n

In that conversation, he said that an essential tool of how he gets along is by using Google’s Project Fi. You may have heard of Project Fi before but I’m betting that unless you have used it yourself, you don’t quite get what it is.<\/p>\n

Project Fi is a cellular service from Google where you pay $20\/month for a service fee, plus $10\/GB for data. You get unlimited domestic talk and text, and unlimited international texting. Unlike any of the cellular plans from\u00a0any of the big US carriers, your data usage is prorated so you only pay for what you use. If you come in under what you thought you’d use for a month, Google\u00a0refunds the difference. Need more than what you thought you’d need? You pay by the MB. Seriously. This would be cool on its own, but the data plan works in more than 135 countries<\/a>.\u00a0\"ATTAs Steve and I go off on our trip to the Galapagos and Machu Picchu, we thought maybe Project Fi would be a good idea. If you haven’t traveled internationally from the US, you may never have checked with your carrier on what it costs. I checked AT&T’s international rates just for grins and giggles<\/a>. I knew it would be bad, but it’s so horrendously bad it’s not even funny. Ready? For a 30 day pass, AT&T charges $40 for 200MB. Yes, $40 for 200MB! Need more? It’s $0.25\/MB. To compare to the Project Fi plan, if we don’t count the monthly fee for either one, 1GB on AT&T is $250, where it’s $10 on Project Fi. Seriously. Oh and you can tether up to 6 devices too.<\/p>\n

Couple more details on Project Fi: you can suspend your account for up to 3 months, and you can cancel it at any time as well.<\/p>\n

Now that I’ve gotten you excited about it, let’s talk about the down side. Project Fi only runs on Android, and it only runs on a few very specific phones<\/a>. But Mike explained a little trick to us. He said that if you get a Project Fi SIM card, and you activate service in one of the specific phones they authorize, you can actually take the card out and put it in an iPhone! Now we’re talkin’, right?<\/p>\n

All we had to do was sign up to fi.google.com<\/a> to get a nano-SIM card, find someone with a Project Fi-capable phone, stick it in, authorize it to my account, pop it into my iPhone and we’re golden. At first I had convinced Rod Simmons of the SMR Podcast to do it for me (he’s a huge Project Fi guy) but I would have had to mail it to him and I wouldn’t get to see how the setup worked.<\/p>\n

We live really close to Tom Merritt of DTNS, and he agreed that it would be fun to test in his phone. He had bought a Nexus phone from Google just for the purpose of using it with Project Fi as a WiFi hotspot on his recent travels to Asia.<\/p>\n

Steve and I went to Tom’s house, ready to get this thing going before our trip. We replaced his Project Fi card with mine and it seemed to go through just fine but then took us to a screen that said my Project Fi service couldn’t be activated because my account currently isn’t authorized for service. Shockingly, Google had a phone number we could call.<\/p>\n

We chatted with a lovely woman who explained that we couldn’t activate my card in Tom’s phone unless Tom deactivated his service from the phone first. Well Tom’s as big into experimenting as anybody, so he basically reformatted the phone from scratch so we could set it up with my card.<\/p>\n

But we got the same error. It turns out that if you have a Project Fi account, you can enable and disable service on phones at will, but you can’t have less than one<\/em> device activated unless you cancel your account.<\/p>\n

Discouraged but not down and out, Steve and I realized we just needed to find someone with a Project Fi-capable phone who hadn’t used it for Project Fi yet. Then it occurred to us that if we did it with someone else’s phone, they would never<\/em> be able to use Project Fi for themselves on their own account. Shoot. Well what if we bought an old phone on eBay? Well, how would we guarantee that it hadn’t ever been activated on someone else’s Project Fi account?<\/p>\n\n\n\n