Fi

[roadrunnertwice]

OK: I went ahead and switched to Google Fi.

I'd been feeling kind of reluctant about it, because it kind of chafes to hand Google even MORE of my critical infrastructure. But then I regained perspective and remembered that I'm weighing the sinister brooding menace of Google against the sinister brooding menace of Fucking Telcos, and if you put it that way, the telcos can go screw.

Why not go with another MVNO, like Consumer Cellular? Well... I'd been on T-Mobile, and one of their nicest perks was free international data service. It was slower than shit, because they were still trying to upsell you for 4G speeds, but it did work for maps and iMessage. None of the other MVNOs I know of have anything like it, and it's been useful often enough that I didn't want to give it up. But Fi does basically the same thing, except 1. LTE speeds, 2. better country coverage (I think), and 3. much cheaper overall. (No international tethering, but I couldn't do that before anyhow.)

So I went ahead and switched now, since we're going out of the country in a couple weeks. And wow, even with all the rough edges on iPhone in the "beta," they still did a surprisingly good job at making it easy to port my number over and get set up. I'll miss visual voicemail, but the texted transcriptions should be about half as good, and also I assume they're working on it.

Oh, pro-tip, though: download your voicemails off your old carrier before you port your number. I forgot to, and now those are gone forever. (I'll live; there were only like two I wanted to hold onto.)