I've been on the $30/mo prepaid T-Mobile plan for ages. 100 min of calling/unlimited text/5 GB LTE data "unlimited". It's been decent for my needs, but was a royal pain when I went to Banff last year for a conference. It took hours for me to get service, and since I needed to call the rental car shuttle bus at the airport, it was very problematic ("what's a 'pay phone'??"). :-(

So, I decided to sign up for Google Fi before my upcoming trip to Japan for a conference. It works best (automatic switching between T-Mobile/Sprint/US Cellular in the US, automatic VPN over public WiFi, etc.) with a "Designed for Fi" phone, and my V30S isn't one of them.

So I bought a V35 ($600 - $100 service credit) from them and signed up.

I got the phone yesterday evening. The switchover was painless (took about 2 minutes over the web on a Google Fi page). Doing the backup and transfer (LG Switch) took about an hour. Backing up and restoring my SMS messages (SMS Backup+) took a few hours. Some apps (Pimlical) had to be transferred manually, some had to be reinitialized (Signal). Overall, it was not bad at all.

Everything seems to be working fine. Here's hoping it works as well as they claim in Japan (no throttling overseas, it "just works")...

Cheers,
Scott.