Does the USA have any open market cellular options that are legitimate pay-as-you-go and only for what you use options like Europe yet?
Does the USA have any open market cellular options that are legitimate pay-as-you-go and only for what you use options like Europe yet?
I've lived under a rock for 10 years. I did Metro ages ago while most were still on contracts. Surely we've reached true capitalist open market freedom by now. Is it still total closed market, noncompetitive, privateering corruption?
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We had that twenty years ago, it just wasn't a very good deal. Nobody wants to pay 2¢ per text.
It was easier before every random website wanted to send you a text with an OTP just to log in and order a pizza or whatever.
That said, if it was $10 / mo for unlimited, or $0.02 per text, I'd take the per-text charge. I don't use texts much and I'd probably save $8 / mo or more.
Wait, you pay to receive texts?
Do you not? I really don't know, I don't use texts much and we've had unlimited texts for like, 15+ years. I always see 'normal carrier fees apply' on OTP notifications, so I just assumed they counted against limited plans.
Finn here. For us, receiving SMS has never cost anything. Downloading MMS, that used to cost, but no-one uses those.
Sending an SMS could be as expensive as 20c when I was a kid. And an SMS is 160 characters. So if you wrote a long one it'd send it as three.
Then when I was about 12-13 there started being unlimited texting packages, which advertised as unlimited but after giving kids access to the service for a few months, limits were soon imposed to like a 1000 sms a month.
I can't imagine being a teenager with only 1000 sms a month. I think at one point i was sending hundreds of texts per day
People in Europe switched to internet based messaging (mostly WhatsApp) as soon as smartphones got popular enough.
It should be more like $2 per gigabyte and everything streamlined as only data. Signal is a better service than any of the service providers offer anyways.