I used to be a Google Fi fan (early adopter at that) for European trips ... but nowadays, with multi-ESims, it is trivial to get a local SIM card and use that.

The local data plans are typically more broadly useable and cheaper than the $10/GB that Fi offers.

When it comes to Europe (and this might apply to other destinations as well) Fi is a bad deal.

Definitely applies to many Asian countries as well.

Often, eSims get significantly better latency too, since you get an IP from close to where you are instead of your data having to cross one or more oceans. A VoIP call between two US SIMs/phones roaming in Asia is not a great experience.

Note that's not always the case: eSIMs I got from Nomad and Airalo in Europe/UK last year were routing things via Hong Kong, so things like DDG and google search using the SIM geolocated me to Hong Kong all the time, and the latency was noticeably bad.

If you read the reviews of some of the eSIMs there are quite a few mentions of this happening.

Definitely – you need to be aware of that when picking one. Some vendors are pretty transparent about their "IP location" these days, fortunately.

Some, like Truphone, even have multiple gateways that are dynamically selected for lower latency, which is very neat (but they're generally more expensive).

Google Fi also has a very annoying rule where you can't sign up when you're out of the country. Found that on while on vacation.

I think its a pretty reasonable anti fraud policy.

Fraud? One needs a Google account to use FI so they for sure know who you are to any degree necessary

Also, defrauding ... what, exactly? If it's a US phone number, there are a bazillion ways to get an SMS enabled US phone number that is either anonymous or pseudoanonymous due to people not wanting to get sexting or pig butchering spam when Yet Another Breach leaks every marketing db in the world

It sucks about google fi after 90d, but Verizon is $10/d or $100 per billing cycle, no? It was easy and cheap for me to get a local sim (in Barcelona and London, at least). Does verizon still lock your phone? I had a bad experience traveling with Verizon to Munich. It was one of a handful of reasons I dropped them as my carrier. This was many years ago though.

fwiw, T-Mobile also have the 90 days restriction. I'm not entirely sure it's a company policy vs a US policy.

It's just an anecdote, but from my one-time experience the 90 days restriction isn't a hard restriction with TMobile. Service worked fine for 5 months for a family member abroad (in a single country) with no issues or messaging from TMobile about an overstay - although this was on a family plan with other phones in the US for the majority of that time.

Google Support tells me it's a Google company policy, not a U.S. policy. And for comparison, Verizon works fine, just by paying a bit extra for extended roaming.

people in the rick steves link say you just tell tmo when you get back in the us to reset it/turn it on for the us. This should not have unclear limits of course.

The issue with having an explicit threshold is super heavy users will use right up to the limit and recommend it to other super heavy users. This MVNO then gets a disproportionate percentage of unprofitable roaming costs. The solution is for them to pass through the costs so there’s no dancing around the costs by suddenly cutting you off.

Interesting. I likely won't be in a position to take a 3+ month trip for a long time. But I just came back from spending 1 month in China and Google Fi worked flawlessly in China and Taiwan. I had better 5G coverage in Shanghai than in the US.

My main complaint is once you go over your data limit and opt into the $10/GB there's no way to restrict your speed. It may sound silly, but I was hesitant to click some links as they may start loading tons of pictures and videos below the fold and cost me a dollar or two per click. So I pretty much limited my browsing to HN!

With uBlock Origin installed (I use Android Firefox), you can block large media elements from loading for all sites or per site. see https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches

I know it's not a good solution, but I wonder if you can send the Google Fi eSim to a friend back in the states to "reset" the 90 day counter then have the friend send you back the eSim.

Do you have a link with more information on the pending changes?

Added link above. The changes took effect last year.

I also love Google Fi, but FYI there are substantially cheaper phones that are still compatible. For example they will sell you this one for $60 right now: https://fi.google.com/about/phones/moto-g-5g-2024. No idea if that's a good phone, just saying that if you're mostly in it for the international coverage there's no reason to pay $800+ for a brand new Pixel when you need a new phone.