 Project five, a phone plan from Google. Meet the phone plan you want to snuggle up with. Okay. Cute marketing, but let's talk about the details. Google has been offering a phone service for a little while. I signed up when it was in termed as a beta project, which was around October of 2015. So three years later, I'm still on project five. I'm still loving their phone plan and it works really well. So how does it work? Well, this is interesting. Google five is not built on a separate cellular network. They're built on the existing cellular network of Sprint, U.S. cellular and T-Mobile. So if you have coverage in the areas that for them, you end up with project five coverage and they have a map. So you can go here and here is the map of the U.S. So if you live anywhere that's green, you're going to get 4G. The lighter green is 3G and the really light green is 2G. So pretty much they've got everything covered. I put myself on the map here in Southgate, Michigan, just south of Detroit. And it's all 4G. It works everywhere. The only time I ever run into any problems is occasionally when I'm in the basement of some buildings, but they do support Wi-Fi calling on their phones. So it hasn't really been an issue as far as service goes. Now, important aspect of Google Fi is the phones. What phone do you use for it? Can I bring my phone over? Maybe. Do you have an unlocked phone that supports Google Fi? It's not likely if you're coming off the other carriers. Here in the U.S., a lot of the carriers lock the phones to their service and you have to go through a process to get them unlocked and it's not always simple or easy and requires a trip to the store and dealing with that. The best way to get Google Fi is with one of their phone plans and their phone together. And the reason why is because you're going to get both a discount and if you want the optional warranty coverage, which is actually really inexpensive, only a few dollars, like five to ten dollars a month from Google Fi, depending on the phone you have, their device coverage is great, but that only comes with when you get the phone from them. So if you do buy it from them, they do have the monthly plans and really reasonable rates on these. So I'm running with the Pixel 2 XL. I love the phone. It's been wonderful. My son just got the Moto G6 and it's a great phone. I got it for him. So I won't say he bought it. He's only 11 and I wanted to put him on the family plan. Which is a new offering. They did not have this previously with Google Fi. It was a one to one. So I had a phone plan and each person had to set up their own plan with Google Fi. Now let's jump right into a couple of the questions people want to ask. And how much is it? That's always, you know, an important aspect is how much is this? Is it more expensive, less expensive? They have a really simple plan. So one person, and you can just slide the slide around, figure out how much data you actually only use about a gig a month. Some months I use two. Most of the time it's one. So that means it's all calls and texts for one person, $20 a month, one gig, $10 a month. Two gigs is $20 a month. And yes, it's incremental. They charge you based on what you actually use. And for one person, it caps at six gigs. For two people, it caps at 10 gigs. And three people, 12, you kind of get the idea that it's really simple. They don't have a lot of bells and whistles. They have a very straightforward system, which is something I really appreciate. Now they don't have stores or anything like that. And that's part of the reason you get these cough seasonings is because with Google Fi, you do everything online. I've never had to talk to anyone. They do have phone support if you needed it. But I've just do everything online, adjust my plan, buy phones, trade up phones, swap things around. It's very simple, very easy to manage. Now what these caps are is it's incremental until it hits six gigs. Then it flat fees, which means anything over here, it just uses the same $80. So it doesn't matter if I use 6.9 gigs or 19 gigs. Now it does have some warnings here. As of January 15, use above 15 gig additional. Additional data may be slowed, but it's still free in months. So they do throttle. So once you hit that 15 gig mark, this is what it means. You're going to slow your data down a little bit. These are just protections that Google puts in there. But they're very upfront about it. There's no hidden things about it. This is something very important. So let's talk about my actual bill. So this is my bill previously. I pulled the one from May because there's variations, but I wanted to show you those variations. So here's my data plan I used, 1.214 gigs, which is $12.14. They actually rate it based on the number of gigs used. I'd hit the details on an international call, but it actually shows the numbers I called. And this is because where I live is really close to Canadian border. So when I'm all the way, there's an island I go to where some clients are. Sometimes it jumps to the Canadian Tower on the far side of the island and they charge you because I'm on the King Tower. This was a problem when I was with Verizon and a lot of other companies because they hit you for so many fees. If I happen to take a call while I'm connected to the Canadian Tower and I took a few of them, it was 80 cents. So international calling rate is actually really inexpensive and it's hardly worth me arguing with them for 80 cents. And you can also turn off, I believe, international roaming and solve the problem with Verizon. I think they were hitting me for $35 fees for connecting to the tower and things like that. So that's something nice about it, but the actual bill that I paid was $36.49. Now, this is the part I made sure I expanded and this is going to vary from state to state based on sales tax and certain surcharges. Google is only charging you for pretty much the minimum fees that have to be recovered for things like Federal Universal Service Fund, Michigan Access Restructuring fee of 10 cents. So it's not no hidden fees. No, hey, it's this much, but my bill was almost double. We see that with some of the other carriers. And that's because they slip in a charge referred to as a recovery fee. The way that works with some of the phone companies or online phone companies and cable companies is if you see some of the recovery fees that they charge, that actually is because they're allowed to charge you a processing fee to process the taxes that they charged you for. I know it sounds crazy, but it's another way that they make money on you and it's how, hey, we promised you X dollars for the plan, but my plan was X dollars plus all the fees we could hide and things like that. So this is my actual bill I'm showing you for $36.49. Now here's my June bill for $45.59. And same thing, regulatory fees, all that. I used more data because I traveled, so I used two gigs of data. So it was 2.04, three gigs, which meant $20.43. And once again, calls and texts are still the flat rate of $20 unlimited. So it doesn't really matter how many phone calls you make. So this is important aspect of Google Fi to me is that the billing is honest and it is what they say it is and that's something that matters. Now let's talk about the family plan support. This is where things get kind of cool. So now that I have my son Marcus on the account, they have an allow payment requests. This is kind of neat the way they set this up. So with Google Fi, when I added him to the family plan, I can say no repayment. He's 11, not likely to pay me back. I can say you owe me a fixed amount per month. You owe me this much per month. And then he with his own Google Pay on his Google account with his Google Pay system can send me that money by putting a credit card into the phone for the Google Pay. Or I can send him his individual total. So if you do this on a family plan, and you want other individuals to pay their part of the bill, you can. You can tell them to pay a fixed amount or you can say no repayment, which in the case of my son, I have set up. This is really nice because now each person knows their bill. When he logs into his account, he can actually see how much data he's using, how much he's cost the plan. Even if I don't have him doing repayment, it's visible for him, so to speak, as a dashboard. So when he goes to fi.google.com and he's logged into his Google account, he can see this and they have an app on the phone that works exactly the same and it looks the same. So managing your plan and managing any of that is actually very, very simple. So it's been great because of this and it also has another feature that I thought was really cool. So let's say Marcus decides, you know what? I don't want to be part of Dad's plan. I want to have my own. This is a really easy task. On the Fi account, Marcus has the option to leave the group plan. This is actually pretty slick. So I went into logged into his account now and he can just leave the group plan, pause the service, pause data. And the same thing. His dashboard looks just like my dashboard. He just doesn't have any master control over the account. He only can control his settings and I've had to blur out his phone number on there. But it's pretty slick system for being able to do that. I love the fact that you can just leave a group plan. That way you do put someone on there where they want to control their own account and do things differently without attaching a tears. You just hit leave and it gives you the option to separate the accounts all together. So once again, Google has made it to where this dashboard allows for really simple back and forth moving through the data plans without like a lot of complexities or ever having to talk to someone. Matter of fact, this is actually one of my favorite things is that I've only had to use their support once in three years because there was a large T-Mobile outage like number of years ago. And all I wanted to know is why I couldn't get incoming calls. They said it was a T-Mobile outage. Google support people right away said, oh, type this code in your phone. It'll jump it over to the Sprint network until that problem's resolved. And it worked flawlessly. And they even said it would automatically go to T-Mobile within 24 hours. It would expire the code I typed in. Their support has been great and easy to get to. Now, a couple of our features I really like about Google Fi is hangouts.google.com. This becomes integrated with part of your Fi. I can make phone calls right from my computer using this microphone. I can use text messaging right here. Video calling is still done through the Hangouts application but it's still integrated as part of the Hangouts. The only thing a little bit confusing is when you're doing a video call they have to be on Hangouts for work so it won't work necessarily as simple through like a contact with just a phone number but if you have a contact with a Gmail address it automatically integrates them into part of the Hangouts. But this makes Google Fi really handy so if I ever don't have my phone available or I'm in somewhere I don't have service I can just open up my laptop and as long as there's a speaker and a microphone I can log into my Gmail that's tied to the Google Fi and go to Hangouts.Google.com and make phone calls, send text messages, send and receive text messages and my whole text history pulls up over here and they do offer voicemail transcription with the voicemail that's on there and it's not an extra charge that's just part of the inclusiveness of Google Fi. So my overall I'm really happy with it as three years into it I am thrilled with the Google service I left Verizon for billing issues headaches and little charges every time I went over to an island I can't be happier with Google Fi what I'm going to do is I have an offer coded below so if you're interested sign up for Fi it's going to get you I believe it's a $20 credit they're offering right now that may change but as the time of the video it is a $20 credit as of right now in August of 2018 that may change depending on when you're watching this video but it is an offer code nonetheless that will get you a discount get you get started on Google Fi if you're interested in it their sign up process is easy the phone choices are good and the if you're still interested in Pixel 2 I may do a follow up review on that that has been a wonderful phone I just got the latest version of Android on it and I've had no issues at all with it Google's been wonderful from top to bottom between the phone I got from them and using it with the Google Fi service and having connectivity everywhere all right thanks thanks for watching if you like this video go ahead and click the thumbs up leave us some feedback below to let us know any details what you like and didn't like as well because we love hearing the feedback or if you just want to say thanks leave a comment if you wanted to be notified of new videos as they come out go ahead and hit the subscribe and the bell icon that lets YouTube know that you're interested in notifications hopefully they send them as we've learned with YouTube anyways if you want to contract us for consulting services you go ahead and hit launch systems.com and you can reach out to us for all the projects that we can do and help you we work with a lot of small businesses IT companies even some large companies and you can farm different work out to us or just hire us as a consultant to help design your network also if you want to help the channel in other ways we have a Patreon we have affiliate links you'll find them in the description you'll also find recommendations to other affiliate links and things you can sign up for on LawrenceSystems.com once again thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video