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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing it took so long to arrive in the USA.

Less amazing is how long it took to take off once it did arrive: cost model. Calling a mobile was quite expensive in Europe, so SMS was a big money saver. While in the US calling a mobile costs the same as calling any other number (you pay, or perhaps "paid" these days, for the privilege of having your phone number on a limited-capacity radio device rather than connected to a pair of wires).

On the cost front, this isn't a flame about Europe-vs-US. But until the iPhone utterly reconfigured the mobile market, the US was a mobile backwater. I really think the cost structure and lack of competition was the reason.

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> But until the iPhone utterly reconfigured the mobile market, the US was a mobile backwater. I really think the cost structure and lack of competition was the reason.

The iPhone and T-Mobile, acting as separate forces on the market, definitely completely alterted the US mobile market. T-Mobile deserves an extraordinary amount of credit for hanging in there, losing a lot of money for a long time, and slowly delivering a more competitive market. It's great to see them getting rewarded with growth and nice profits.

I love all the fruitfan revisionist history. The US might have been a mobile backwater, but the iPhone was hardly the point of change. For god's sake there was free night and weekend minutes as early as 2000 and by 2007 Sprint SERO was giving away unlimited data and all the feature phones and PDA's could browse the web, had GPS-enabled maps, and ran loads of J2ME games.

The iPhone was an evolution not a revolution.

He was talking specifically about texting, when he mentioned the iPhone. And he’s right, Americans didn’t start texting until the iPhone made it cheap

But that's not true. Regular people were texting each other back in the 90s.

Not even close to the same degree that texting was popular in europe

I (from the US) studied in France in 2003. In the US, most college sophomores at a very affluent school may not have even had mobile phones, let alone texted using them. In Paris, everyone had a mobile phone and everyone texted. There was a huge difference until a few years later (after I had graduated, with respect to mobile use generally and then the Blackberry and really then the iPhone did make texting popular).

This sounds wrong. Almost everyone had a cell phone by 2003. I remember because we all stopped subscribing to dorm landlines.

Here's a chart, population of US is 320M: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Annual_C...

> And he’s right, Americans didn’t start texting until the iPhone made it cheap

The T-Mobile Sidekick might want to argue with that point. Though not focused on pure SMS, mobile messaging was most certainly popular.

(And arguments about the Sidekick not being real SMS will run into arguments that with iPhone users tend towards iMessage, which is not pure SMS!)

The argument wasn’t meant to be that texting didn’t exist until the iPhone

It’s the disparity between how popular texting was in Europe compared to the US before the iPhone became popular. Texting didn’t permeate American culture the same way it did in the EU in the late nineties/early noughts

I was curious about this, so here you go:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/215776/mobile-messaging-...

It's correct, texting in the US exploded with the modern smartphone. A four fold increase from 2007 to 2011. That said, it's not easy to separate out how much of that was the smartphone vs competitive pressure on text messaging costs and package inclusion of lots of texts / unlimited. The iPhone forced a leap in focusing on bandwidth as the new new thing for profitability as a carrier (so they more willingly gave up texting as a profit center).

By contrast, the UK sent about 1/2 as many text messages as the US in 2004, while having 1/5 the population. A sizable difference for sure.

Everyone I knew was texting by 2004. Most plans came with a few hundred free messages every month. If anything iPhone has been the demise of texting, since it made it easier to use apps that sidestep texting. Do you not remember all the people who could type faster in t9 than they could on a keyboard?

Indeed, there was a culture around texting already before the iPhone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTqmCRoSWT4

I think texting would've taken off in the late 2000s whether the iPhone happened or not. The timing was right. It was already huge in Japan.

I would say T9 helped get teens texting FAR more than the iPhone did. Now the iPhone helped get more phones into the hands of teenagers which probably increased the number of texters, but T9's predictive text messaging capabilities helped turn everyone who owned a flip phone into a texter.

It took a long time to take off in the UK too, despite heading calling party pays. SMS enablement was a subscription service - £5/month from memory - and initially there want interconnect between mobile networks so texts were limited to those on the same provider. On the other hand, the original plans were all you can eat, and pager gateways worked for SMS too.

It took off when interconnect was sorted.

Initially it was within the same network, I believe Orange (previously Hutchinsons, then merged with EE, who themselves known as T-Mobile) was the first to offer a consumer service, called Orange Messaging. As an aside they also offered a second line on the same phone,meaning you had 2 number an option not offered these days alas.

But nice trick was to set a foreign SMSC, this not only enabled you to send SMS to other UK networks, but also didn't charge you. Circa 1998 era.

Back in the day, Orange were truly innovative although their promise of a wire-free future was a bit optimistic.

I was regularly texting in 1998 with friends at university i.e. they'd taken off sufficiently that within 5 years poor university students were texting each other. It was always a case of buying a £5 credit, or you might text a friend back a few days later because you had no credit.

I even remember in my sixth-form, in 1995/1996 one guy did a presentation for his physics assignment about how using a mobile fried your brain, and the richer (middle-class) kids all had one by then.

So this isn't true at all, within 2/3 years it was becoming main-stream in the UK.

I still remember in the early 2000s Americans in their TV shows were all about pagers, which never really took off in the UK, and it was like they lived in a totally different world, communication wise.

The same thing happened in New Zealand. Mobile calling, until recently, was prohibitively expensive.

NZ$30 (~US$20) per month, back in 2010, would get you 300 SMS, 300 minutes during night and weekend, and 20 minutes during the day.

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