Google Fi review and coverage in India and China
You need not buy a local sim card to whichever country you travel to. I had traveled to India and China in 2019, and it is as simple as that. You get on a flight, turn on airplane mode, turn it off after touch down, and you have network and data even before you get off the plane. Having spent a couple of weeks in each country, I never really felt the urge to buy or use a local sim card. I don’t use too much data. I stream audio over data, but never video. My usual monthly data usage is about 5GB, and it seems convenient to use it on Google Fi rather than activating a new sim.
Full disclosure: I did use an Airtel sim when I was in India on some occasions. It was a number that I registered over a decade ago and it’s, thankfully, still active. If I hadn’t had that one around, I wouldn’t have activated a new one for sure. Calling an Indian number when in India would be some 20c per minute, but I could use Whatsapp or iMessage to get the job done, which I do for the most part anyway.
Speeds in both countries were all comparable and not substantially different to the untrained eye. I always got LTE in both countries. Although I was cocooned in the modern city of Shenzhen for my entire China trip, I did visit my native village in rural Andhra Pradesh and speeds were just as good as that of Hyderabad, if not better. Same in Mysuru and Bengaluru. In case you didn’t already know, India probably has the cheapest data rates in the world as of 2019. Thanks, Jio. LTE coverage is impressive as well.
However, on my previous trip to India in 2018, I never got LTE. It was either H+ or sometimes E and that sucked. This is post-Jio’s launch. I’m glad Google was able to find a better partner at least in 2019. Speaking of partners, Fi was using China Mobile’s network in China and I’m not sure which network it was using in India.
Although my experience with Google Fi has been pleasant on all my travels, there have been several posts on Reddit and Google Support forums with people complaining about 2G speeds even in 2020. On my trips, I had used Google Fi on multiple phones. iPhone 11, Pixel 3 and Pixel 1. It always seems to have worked fine once I changed the AccessPoint settings to what Fi suggests. Maybe I just got lucky.
Whatever I’ve mentioned in this blog post is based on my personal experience. YMMV.
To conclude, I wanted to write this post to document what my experience has been like and was hoping it would help other travelers. Google Fi seems like the perfect network for any GlobeTrotter. Someone like the invisible guy from Wendover Productions who traveled to over a dozen foreign countries in a year and not staying in any of them for more than a week. Most people never travel anywhere close to that much though.
That is where matters get tricky. $10 per GB might be on par with the industry in the US, it is astronomical compared to the data prices of post-Jio India. You might be better off buying a local sim in India if you plan to stay longer than a week or two.
Data plans in China might not be anywhere as inexpensive as in India, but Google Fi does have an advantage when it comes to this mystical part of the world. It’s no surprise that Google’s services are blocked by the Great Firewall. However, since Google Fi is using China Mobile’s network infrastructure, it must already have a VPN in place to encrypt all the data before it hits that network. This way, it’s able to bypass the Great Firewall completely and offer access to not just Google’s, but also Facebook’s services, like Instagram and Whatsapp without the need to subscribe to another VPN Service. That’s a nice little perk.
Speaking of blocked Google Services, did you know that even Apple Maps is better than Google Maps on Mainland China? I guess that’s a story for another time.
That’s it for today. Have a good one. Cheers!
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