When entry level mobile phones became mainstream in the UK (probably around 2000, around the time of the Nokia 3210/3310), SMS were charged at 10p/12p a pop.
Around a year or two later, a mobile network (O2 for the fellow Brits when they changed from Cellnet) kicked off their online offerings with a Genie SIM, which allowed for a whopping 300 free text messages if you applied £15 credit in a month, which remained for calls while you still had an allowance. Data was delivered over dialup at the time. GPRS was far too fancy for data.
My social life went to another gear after that. At least until mid month when my free messages and minutes evaporated.
Going back over your text message trying to trim it down as much as possible because you were a few characters over a single text limit and like fuck you were using a whole additional text message from your allowance for the sake of a few characters.
Yes!! That said, that Genie SIM started my love affair with not giving a fuck and writing multipage messages, which at the time was a bit of a “fuck you” to folk whose phones didn’t like them one bit and presented them as individual messages in their inbox.
Didn’t need the double ticks in those days, bitch we had read receipts and awwww yeah you had a message to prove you were left on read 😂
which at the time was a bit of a “fuck you” to folk whose phones didn’t like them one bit and presented them as individual messages in their inbox.
Ha I had problems with the multi-message thing even a few years ago, sending messages from android to iOS. I tend to send very verbose messages, and the delay between them, as well as having it come through as text, made them a jumbled mess.
For a while I was putting numbers before every sentence if I thought the message was too long to be one message.
So glad that doesn’t happen anymore, tho we solved it by swapping to signal, I’m not sure the problem itself ever resolved.
I’m out here dialing 10-10-321…
Not 10-10-220?!
What does this relate to? Only had limited dial-up back then (it’s probably some US stuff?).
I think now pretty much every plan has free domestic phone calls. International calls, you still pay per minute?
Anyway, back then even domestic calls on a cell phone you paid by minute. Even for local calls. Unlike landline where the local call would be free.
Then some plans started introducing unlimited free calls after some time of day, 9pm as this suggests.
Which made sense probably since people using their cell phone for business were no longer putting load on the network after business hours. And young broke people like myself at the time, who were not using their phone for business, could then use the network without the extra fees. The carrier can offer this additional perk, they can get more customer sign ups, and it’s not hurting them since the network load was lower long after business hours.
Then when texts came around they costed extra, just for funsies. Limited number with possibly massive fees for going over. Yet the texts took up no real room that the phones weren’t already using to communicate with towers
Oh my god, they would charge per text, including texts that you’ve received.
So you’d be charged if someone you don’t even know sent you an SMS lol
Here in the UK, I used to read about Americans having free local calls in the computing mags. We had to pay local rate for our dial up. We had to wait till weekends and evenings to get off peak call rates. Freeserve was the first ISP here that gave no subscription charges for dial up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeserve
They later brought in something called Freeserve Hometime, which iirc was freephone dial up during off peak. I renamed the icon to Freeserve Downtime, because we used to get connection issues. No one in my family thought it was funny.
“Sorry, got d/c’d” “Gotta go, my mum wants to use the phone”
Good times. I miss old school Internet.
We had unlimited night data plans here in India for some time. Might still be available in some places.
