I remember when it was released and I wished I was in Kansas.

I'm smack in the middle of debating Google Fi, this probably won't impact my decision, but I wonder if it will suffer a similar fate.

I'll be sad when Google Fi is eventually killed. It's honestly amazing to have a service that's purely transactional. No notifications, no upsells, no "oops we had a data breach" (except the time it happened upstream), no roaming. Just a monthly payment exchanged for service.

How is this different from what other prepaid carriers like Mint offer?

The big thing keeping me from switching from Google Fi is how easy international roaming is. For every country I've been to, I've just had it automatically work within ten minutes of landing, at my regular price, without buying any addons

Except if you happen to travel for more than 45 days, in which case Google Fi will promptly tell you to get fucked and cut off your service without warning, advanced notice, or spelling out anywhere when you sign up. Not my idea of a carrier I can trust. I deleted my account and service with them to move to a carrier that I can trust and actually respects me as a customer.

What service do you use now?

I got bad speed even with perfect signal in malls and any place that is more crowded than a Costco. Google Fi doesn't have that problem. I blame it on T-mobile but I would rather Google Fi survives.

Fi’s customer service has long since turned to shit, but the things keeping me on it are the data sims, simple international roaming, and international calling. That trifecta is pretty hard to find a match for. Especially the data sims. But if you don’t need that, I probably wouldn’t recommend Fi. My wife had endless trouble with multiple bad sim cards and the customer service experience was just as dreadful as every other carrier.

Well, shit. Google Fiber has been the least-bad residential ISP I've dealt with. They put the fear of Competition in all the other ISPs in town, giving us an immediate free speed boost years before Google Fiber actually made it to our neighborhood.

But more than most Google projects, it's always been clear that they could at any time get bored with it and give up.

I was paying IIRC $85 USD to spectrum a month for 300 down and 10 up. Google fiber came to my neighborhood a year and a half ago and offered 1gb symmetrical for $70, so 3x more down and 100x more up for less money.

I’ll actually be optimistic and say we will make it a year before the price hikes start

> They put the fear of Competition in all the other ISPs in town, giving us an immediate free speed boost years before Google Fiber actually made it to our neighborhood.

It sounds like Google Fiber’s underlying mission was successful: to improve the quality of Internet experience nationwide. They didn’t even have to undertake the difficulty and expense of an actual buildout in most cases!

Ah the Google graveyard thrives.

I remember when Google fiber was all the rage back around 2013, and I so desperately wanted it to come to my neighborhood, anything to offset the Comcast regime. Deeply disappointed that there were so many barriers preventing its expansion. From pole access to just straight up anti-competitive behavior from Comcast, fiber could've really been something great but the law just wouldn't allow it.

I'm glad that a farmer utility co-op exists here that offers GFiber-equivalent of 1 GbE symmetric and unlimited data for no contract $99/month with an $65/month intro rate. Also has 500 Mbps for $75 ($40) and 250 Mbps $65 ($30). Municipal broadband and electricity needs to take back community services away from profiteering corporations and private equity vampires, and really benefit from government-assisted grants and loans and templatized processes and governance to bootstrap more of these.

One of the major pluses of GFiber is it largely ignored DMCA requests. Also, the 20 Gbps ONT beta service was rad. A weak point was their mesh routers that didn't work quite right and would refuse to work if "too close together".. 20 ft apart. Their customer service/tech support was pretty awesome.

this will age poorly... and Google will launch a new fiber Network offering in 5 years

At this point purchasing Google services/products is a real risk for business continuity.

It really is. You could not pay me to tie my business to Google at this point. I need someone I can trust won't just pull the plug in a year when they get bored, and Google isn't that company.

Well shoot. I have Google Fiber 1 gig, and generally been happy. Hopefully service uptime and price does not change.

any ideas why they are selling this?

Didn't they announce they were selling it off a while back? I thought the reason was it's not very much like the other things Google does.

Almost certainly so that they can afford more AI data center capex.