Tong Family

Well, I’ve had an old Nexus 5 and a Google Fi plan for emergencies, but now that I realize you really should have two phones with you, on international trips, I decided to turn on this plan. It is a minimal $20 plan with $10/GB, but it works well for emergencies.

The problem is that it is not clear how you actually transfer from a sim to an e-sim and it is not clear how to do all this. But it turns out that it is very unobvious, you basically set up your new phone on your account and it assumes you want to deactivate your current phone. But basically, the transfer is not very obvious at all. There is no transfer user interface at all, you activate the phone and it assumes you are transferring by just doing an iOS setup:

1. It says you need to delete the existing esim if you have one, but you don’t have to do that. But basically, you go to the new phone and download the Google Fi application
2. Then go to Settings > Cellular and choose Add new. Then on your other device, you will get a QR code, scan it with your new phone and that’s it, it just works!
3. You do have to go to Settings > Cellular > Cellular Data Network and manually fill in the APN information with h2g2 and then MMSC is set to HTTP://m.fi.goog/mms/wapenc and Max message side to a comical 23456789 and finally, the Personal Hotspot APN is h2g2-t

Amazingly, then you go back to the computer and it just says it all works! Note that the default is that you are *not* creating a new member to your plan, but you are doing an add device and this automatically disables the current device.