I travel outside the US every year or two and trying to figure out how to get cell service that doesn't cost a fortune is maddening. Project Fi sounds great for that reason (unthrottled LTE data outside the US) alone.

But I'm reading that there are issues on Fi, of course.

T-Mobile has VoLTE and E911 on Band 12, but Sprint and US Cellular (the other big carriers for Fi) don't. So VoLTE doesn't work on Fi even if the phone is certified compatible on T-Mobile. Which means that E911 might or might not be problematic depending on which tower you're connected to at the time.

I've also read that TV Channel 51 uses the 700 MHz Block A spectrum that T-Mobile uses for Band 12. My folks in NC are in the WFMY Greensboro service area which uses, you guessed it, 700 MHz Block A. So there's no hope of using Band12 there until the TV station transmitter is moved to a different frequency, and it seems there's little or no plans for that to happen soon.

Nothing's simple. :-(

It looks like switching to Fi isn't an obvious choice for me at the moment. But neither is just sticking with T-Mobile. Gotta see how things play out.

It still makes sense for me to wait for the V20 reviews, but the Pixel XL does sound like a very nice phone (what with the fancy image processing via the 821 chip, fast OS updates, etc., etc.).

Cheers,
Scott.