Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: ElfinArc6 Newsgroups: misc.phone.mobile.iphone,comp.mobile.android,alt.internet.wireless Subject: Re: What is Google Fi and what does it mean for Android & iOS equipment? Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2016 09:31:06 -0500 (CDT) Organization: news.individual.net Lines: 40 Message-ID: References: <170920162010000894%nospam@nospam.invalid> <180920161020030963%nospam@nospam.invalid> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net apZ+PQLZAIWybzQcIeb2QgulJAQ8M+u7kU4mAdsvUtafBKl/Cb Cancel-Lock: sha1:g8RxbrX2xf4Hw8zfZReqpWBx68I= X-Newsreader: PiaoHong.Usenet.Client.VIP:1.65 Xref: csiph.com misc.phone.mobile.iphone:92599 comp.mobile.android:34442 alt.internet.wireless:15814 nospam Wrote in message: > In article , Bert > wrote: > >> > it means nothing for most android and all ios equipment since it's >> > only supported on the nexus 5x, 6 & 6p. >> >> The service requires a phone that can do both GSM and CDMA, since it >> uses T-Mobile, Sprint and US Cellular. > > no it doesn't. it requires a phone specifically designed to switch > among multiple carriers on the fly, and there aren't a whole lot of > those. as in three. > Yep, only those 3 at the moment. Most likely that the new Pixel branded phones will also since they are the next generation of Google's phones. But that really limits just how big an MVNO Google wants to be. In the Android world Samsung is the elephant in the room, but Project Fi does not now work with them or any others. And no iPhone support either. In the Project Fi G+ community there are all sorts of ideas about how to make iPhones work on the system. You can put an already activated Project Fi sim in an iPhone, but it only works on T-Mobile, no switching. Or you can use the data SIM in it and use something like Hangouts, but again only on T-Mobile since the data SIM only does TMO. When I was with Project Fi I had the 5X and a data sim in my iPhone, but it was less than satisfactory for a number of reasons, the biggest being that in spite of TMO's (and other carriers), coverage maps, the data on TMO was pretty weak and spotty around here. Hell even Sprint was weak as hell. So I dropped them and went back to Verizon, could just as easily gone to AT&T for about the same cost and coverage. It is just the other actual cell carriers that aren't so good in this rural area. -- Elfin