I've been on Project Fi now for about 3 months and can share my experience. First a bit of background, I was on ting (a spring MVNO) and was experiencing bad service inside my house. Call quality was abysmal. I bought the sprint femtocell to improve in house quality and that femtocell literally does not work. They have had known bugs with the femtocell for years and don't address it. So I decided to speak with my wallet and stop rewarding a company for crappy business practices. No more $ for you sprint. Fix your femtocells.
My specific interest for Project Fi was to improve call quality in my house. Knowing that it relies on wifi when available this was a huge selling point for me because I could ditch buggy femtocells and just rely on a wifi connection alone. Coming from the above experience this was a huge selling point especially because every friends house now magically has a "femtocell" too. You're basically guaranteed excellent service anywhere there is wifi, which these days is nearly everywhere.
From a price point factor I personally felt Project Fi was too expensive. I would not be on Project Fi if they didn't have the pay for per use model (cleverly disguised in "refund for data not used" format) so that is a plus. My main goal was to minimize my Project Fi bill to where it could compete with Ting. To do this I would need to run the phone on wifi only (go to airplane mode, then enable wifi). This would ensure that I wouldn't unwittingly use data when out and about and my data bill would essentially be nill bringing the price point to about $20 per month.
So onward i charged with with my wifi only phone. I received calls, voicemails, texts, everything was working as expected. About a month in my ISP went down temporarily and i decided to use the carrier data to look something up. I turned airplane mode off and in came a slurry of updates. I had multiple new voicemail notifications, new texts I hadn't seen yet, all sorts of delayed information coming in in a huge influx.
I found out a friend had called and left a voicemail over a week ago asking me questions I never answered because i got a notification of new voicemail now, 7 days later. Over text I was invited to a party that was now in the past (to the person inviting me it was like a completely ignored their text).
Having recently moved to a new state and trying to make new friends, I found this very frustrating. Obviously I have a very extreme, uncommon use case. I was trying to do severe penny pinching which most people won't bother with. However, it was unfortunate to have to find out I couldn't run the phone the way I wanted because of Project Fi's issues with wifi capabilities. It was especially unfortunate to find this out after investing $500+ in a phone just to try this carrier, but I knew the risks.
Since then I had to keep the phone in normal carrier mode to ensure i was receiving updates as expected. After making that change, I haven't had any issues to report other than the following quirk:
You know how Project Fi advertises it will switch over to whichever signal is strongest seamlessly? That might be true for voice calls but it is not true for data transfer. I play a phone game which is a simple "raid" game. The game is played by making repeated 3 minute raids on someone else's base. During the raid, the game keeps a constant connection to the server and if you drop connection at all, your raid is counted as a loss. They do this to prevent people from simply force closing the game mid-raid if a raid wasn't going well.
Remember that "seamless" transfer? Not the case. There were tons of raids i would be in the middle of and the game would sense the switch in carrier, count it as a disconnect, and count the raid as a loss. For a high level player this completely destroyed the ability to play the game because you are severely punished for losses while only gaining a point or two for a win. I ultimately stopped playing the game because it was impossible to play anymore on this carrier.
All of that aside, the service has been good. The call quality has been good. And in general I'm happy enough to keep the carrier simply because I am hopeful google will fix these issues and in all honesty it works better than the sprint solution (I just have to pay more than i originally wanted to for it). My suggestions for Project Fi would be:
My specific interest for Project Fi was to improve call quality in my house. Knowing that it relies on wifi when available this was a huge selling point for me because I could ditch buggy femtocells and just rely on a wifi connection alone. Coming from the above experience this was a huge selling point especially because every friends house now magically has a "femtocell" too. You're basically guaranteed excellent service anywhere there is wifi, which these days is nearly everywhere.
From a price point factor I personally felt Project Fi was too expensive. I would not be on Project Fi if they didn't have the pay for per use model (cleverly disguised in "refund for data not used" format) so that is a plus. My main goal was to minimize my Project Fi bill to where it could compete with Ting. To do this I would need to run the phone on wifi only (go to airplane mode, then enable wifi). This would ensure that I wouldn't unwittingly use data when out and about and my data bill would essentially be nill bringing the price point to about $20 per month.
So onward i charged with with my wifi only phone. I received calls, voicemails, texts, everything was working as expected. About a month in my ISP went down temporarily and i decided to use the carrier data to look something up. I turned airplane mode off and in came a slurry of updates. I had multiple new voicemail notifications, new texts I hadn't seen yet, all sorts of delayed information coming in in a huge influx.
I found out a friend had called and left a voicemail over a week ago asking me questions I never answered because i got a notification of new voicemail now, 7 days later. Over text I was invited to a party that was now in the past (to the person inviting me it was like a completely ignored their text).
Having recently moved to a new state and trying to make new friends, I found this very frustrating. Obviously I have a very extreme, uncommon use case. I was trying to do severe penny pinching which most people won't bother with. However, it was unfortunate to have to find out I couldn't run the phone the way I wanted because of Project Fi's issues with wifi capabilities. It was especially unfortunate to find this out after investing $500+ in a phone just to try this carrier, but I knew the risks.
Since then I had to keep the phone in normal carrier mode to ensure i was receiving updates as expected. After making that change, I haven't had any issues to report other than the following quirk:
You know how Project Fi advertises it will switch over to whichever signal is strongest seamlessly? That might be true for voice calls but it is not true for data transfer. I play a phone game which is a simple "raid" game. The game is played by making repeated 3 minute raids on someone else's base. During the raid, the game keeps a constant connection to the server and if you drop connection at all, your raid is counted as a loss. They do this to prevent people from simply force closing the game mid-raid if a raid wasn't going well.
Remember that "seamless" transfer? Not the case. There were tons of raids i would be in the middle of and the game would sense the switch in carrier, count it as a disconnect, and count the raid as a loss. For a high level player this completely destroyed the ability to play the game because you are severely punished for losses while only gaining a point or two for a win. I ultimately stopped playing the game because it was impossible to play anymore on this carrier.
All of that aside, the service has been good. The call quality has been good. And in general I'm happy enough to keep the carrier simply because I am hopeful google will fix these issues and in all honesty it works better than the sprint solution (I just have to pay more than i originally wanted to for it). My suggestions for Project Fi would be:
- First and foremost, fix the "wifi" portion of the service. I should be able to leave my phone in wifi only and constantly get updates in a timely fashion. No missed calls, voicemails, or texts should occur when in wifi mode. This is extremely frustrating.
- If possible, fix the issue regarding "seamless data connection". Playing phone games on the road is nearly impossible the way the carrier data service is currently setup because of the frequent data disconnects.
- Offer "family" or "group" pricing. I understand this will likely come with time and I will remain patient, but families need a cheaper way to be on project fi. Project Fi is simply too expensive as it is.
- Consider reducing the "base" cost of talk and text. $20 is extremely steep when compared to the competition. Would you consider a pay per use on talk /text instead of a base cost? Anything you can do to lower that $20 entry fee.
- Modify your advertising to be simpler. Stop forcing people to decide on a data plan level when regardless of what they pick, the pricing stays exactly the same. In other words simply advertise Fi's costs are base + 1 cent per MB. Let us then choose whatever controls we want to turn off data usage at a certain level, configure multiple warnings at certain levels, etc. Sure sounds a lot easier from a billing perspective as well because you wouldn't have to mess around with refunds.
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I GOT DENIED TEH CREDIT APPLICATION 
