- Maximizing the Merrill + card 50,000 point signon bonus by Miles Per Day. Great idea!
- Reader sent their site Trekommend over to us. Pretty cool concept, you select a city you’re travelling to and the dates you’ll be there and it lets you know what events will be on. Feel free to make suggestions on how to improve the site in the comments, as I’m sure the owner will be here responding.
- To Nobody’s Surprise, United Won’t Have to Pay Out On Its 2016 Performance Guarantee by Cranky Flier.
- Utah Woman Claims Planes are Dumping Poop in Her Driveway by View From The Wing.
- A Secret Benefit of Google Fi for International Travel by Running For Miles. Anybody know how this works in countries that censor content?
That “Fi” trick is really a technical implementation that’s used by most of the world’s operators (I know of confirmations on ATT and T-Mo USA). They basically tunnel all your traffic back to your normal roaming US headend before sending it out onto the internet. This has been known for years and is something the network operator community would rather keep under wraps, to be frank; I had quite a conversation about it on NANOG some time back, around the time that VFTW published it. FWIW, Fi is just riding on the coat-tails of the work T-Mobile has done to build out their international network and pricing. Fi is only willing to pay more than T-Mo will for their customers’ data (hence, Fi users got LTE speeds while T-Mo users were still limited to 3G or 256Kbps; I’m not sure whether this has changed for T-Mo users recently).
This is how you can access Google while in China, BTW. So yes, it works in the world’s foremost country that censors content, but don’t for a second think the Communist Party is unaware; the Great Firewall is one of the most advanced machine learning systems (possibly, THE most advanced) on the planet. It’s no accident that there are exactly 3 VPN providers that work in China and international roaming is the only “easy” route to escape the firewall.
Interesting, thanks for the information.
That Fi trick should work the same as any other US SIM card would work in that given country. That is, unless we are talking about North Korea, I’m pretty sure they bypass the firewall as you are technically not on an in-country network.
It probably also means you will have a very bad latency and bandwidth.
Thanks, Will, for mentioning trekommend.com! Yes, would love to get feedback on the site from readers and you can always catch us at [email protected] or here since I’m literally reading DoC every day 🙂