Google's play is to bypass the carrier altogether, which they will do as soon they get broadband in many homes and use their own souped up wifi routers to create a network that will allow you to be forever internet-connected. And when you are not, they will roam.
I think this is Google's long term plan, and its a pretty great one. You will literally be connected anywhere on the globe with Google Fiber based HetNet wireless, and wifi beamed down on the rest of the earth from Balloons.
I am not sure balloons are viable. For short term disaster sure, but long term is too much maintenance. Besides worsening hurricane/wind trend is likely to continue. I think they might just deploy network of cube sats, and figure out low power satellite uplink if they are really shooting for global connectivity.
Be careful with Republic Wireless. They are completely anti-rooting, require customized proprietary software to use their service, and you're out of luck if you want to cancel the service after 30 days.
I can see why they're anti-rooting--they need to be able to offload voice + SMS traffic to wifi, and they can't do that if you've flashed a custom ROM or whatever. I think they're hoping to eventually have the wifi calling stuff packaged as an app, so it could be installed on whatever ROM (or device) you wanted. But for now, it's integrated with the android system at a very low level.
> you're out of luck if you want to cancel the service after 30 days.
Sort of. There's no early termination fee, so in that way it's better than legacy carriers. But you can't take your RW phone and use it on any other network, so you are out the cost of the device.
