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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

Just a decade ago, SMS messages in the US cost 10 to 25 cents per SMS. You also got charged for spam SMS. Prices were completely disjointed from the reality of underlying costs (zero for the telcos). My college CS professor gave senate testimony on this: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/keshav_testim...

(side rant: in the following ten years, the tech giants sweeped in, competed, provided a better service, with better cross-platform support, for zero dollar immediate cost to the end customer -- gained a massive following (think whatsapp), and are now vilified for their "monopoly" and the "harm" it has caused.)

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>You also got charged for spam SMS

Wait what? They charge you for receiving text messages or am I not reading that right? Do they also charge you to receive phone calls haha?

Yes. In the US, cellular calls are charged by air time so you pay for incoming calls as well. I think all plans are unlimited these days though.

there are still 'per minute' plans. I still have one for a family member's "emergency" phone.

My plan has unlimited text, but only 100 minutes of talk (which is almost always plenty).

My Mom is still on a strict per minute plan, with a stored value plan though. I think she gets free incoming text, but has to pay for calls or texts she sends.

Checkout Mint Mobile: $15/month if you prepay for a year otherwise $20. You get unlimited talk and texts, 4GB data. https://www.mintmobile.com/

Good if you're single but if you have family something like Cricket's Unlimited Basic gets you unlimited (22GB before throttling) data and talk/text for $25/line for four lines is better.

As an aside, as a single person I feel the discounts that come with family plans to be weirdly discriminatory. I go with prepaid TMobile (10gb for $40) because it’s much cheaper than a regular(?) plan with only 1 line. But to hook my Apple Watch up to cellular, I need the regular plan ($75 for one line + $10 for Apple Watch) as prepaid tech is years behind and second tier (most MVNOs included). That means that the only way I can use an Apple Watch on cellular as a single person is by paying $45 more per month. Complaining about an Apple Watch is a first world problem, but I think the pricing system is unfair.

I really wonder whether young members of the family consume more or less data, or what other reason could be used to justify family-discounting.. but it’s probably like a parent comment said: there’s no correlation between costs to the carrier and price the consumer pays; the single/family split exists to create the maximum profit off both groups by penalizing single people and convincing families to add all younger members to the plan (even those that might not need it). IMO carriers should give an age discount for under 18, not a per-line reduction the more members are in your plan.

I've had every single Apple Watch since the original one and never had the need to get cellular for it. What's the use case for when you got a watch on you but no phone near it (but still NEED to be reachable somehow)?

Running. Phones are massive these days and impractical to take running. Still need to be reachable for any number of reasons (or call if there's an emergency).

People who want to run without water or any kind of fanny pack. I bought an Apple Watch and got a cellular plan for it and quickly realized there was absolutely no reason I really needed it.

(It's also true that I long predate cell phones--and also am often in places that don't have cell phone coverage--so I really don't have the mindset that I always have to be reachable right now.)

I got the cellular version to make tech detoxing easier. I find I can think more creatively when I leave my phone at home when going on walks. With a watch with cellular I could see myself regularly going weekends without my phone.

What I’m doing in the meantime is popping my sim from my smartphone into an old Nokia.

They say "Family" but that's for marketing. If you have friends you trust to pay you, they don't actually check social security numbers or anything.

Cricket wants as many subscribers as possible, so they give discounts to groups of four.

Yes. Just to clear things up this was a big surprise to me as a european the first times I visited the US.

I'm not surprised, that really does boggle the mind.

We do the same thing with internet in the US. E.g., if someone sends me an email, I'm the one that has to pay my email provider for handling it, and I'm the one that has to pay and bandwidth costs to download it from my email provider to my computer.

Isn't that how it works elsewhere?

If so, what is mind boggling about the US using the same system for other communications networks besides the internet?

Not really the same, you pay your ISP the same regardless of how much (or even if) you use email.

In most of the world, the caller used to pay (or maybe still pays in some places?) extra for calling a mobile number. This is easy to arrange and clear to the caller since mobile numbers are in a separate area code range. As I understand, in the US mobile numbers use the same area codes as fixed numbers, so this isn't possible. Receiving a call on a fixed number in the US is still free, I suppose?

Where I live I pay one bill, and that gives me unlimited bandwidth on my home fibre connection, mine and my wife's mobiles, and unlimited minutes and text messages. I've used the same free email provider for 20 years!

>what is mind boggling

What's your phone number? I'll txt you every 10 minutes for a month. And you'll pay for it. Like it or not. Mind boggling.

Correct, before 2011ish, you were charged for SENT and RECEIVIED messages. They often had "plans" where you would get 100sms/month or 250 sms/month, or a-la-carte. If you got an SMS spam, that counted to your allotment. SMS was so expensive compared to GChat/YahooMessenger/ICQ/etc that I didnt use it. But then you were on the "a-la-carte" plan of 10 or 25cents per message depending on your provider. Godforbid you sent an international SMS, those were 50cents a message and MMS (SMS with image) was 5o to 75 cents per message. My provider had no apparent way to not have the service, so you were essentially bullied into paying a-la-carte or bullied into a plan.

Friends would get angry at each other for sending a message, or breaking a sentence into two messages.

Again, I think it is INSANE that half the US legislature is trying to fault WhatsApp (100% no dollar cost) for being a "monopoly" given the situation that was fixed. https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/competition_in_dig...

The major problem with WhatsApp are that they joined forces with Zuckerberg.

Low sms pricing was on its way anyway since the cost of one byte sms was like 10 000 fold to ip data.

Yes that is how it used to work for sms. My first cell I had to convince people to not text me because I didn't pay the extra ~$35 a month for texting, which I think got you 500 monthly texts. Friends that didn't know or when it was "an emergency" would send a few texts and cost me extra couple bucks a month.

For calls you used to get a pleasure with a set amount of minutes, such as 200, 500, and 1000 per month. Most carriers let you "roll over" unused minutes and typically anything after 9pm didn't count. Though I remember cingular offering 7pm as the unlimited time if you paid an extra fee (don't remember the cost).

Slowly larger plans, then unlimited became more normal. I can of remember it becoming more cost effective the same time more people were getting internet through cable or dsl, instead of dial up. So 2002-2005ish?

> Though I remember cingular offering 7pm as the unlimited time if you paid an extra fee

I also seem to remember that if you started a call at (for example) 6:59pm, and it lasted an hour, all 60 minutes were "premium" minutes, not 1 "premium" and 59 "free/unlimited".

That just sounds like lazy programming becoming a feature for the chief revenue officer ;)

Call call = new Call(timestamp);

String hour = call.getHour();

if (hour < 19 hour && hour > 6) call.setRate("Premium"); //military time

If you started a call at 5:59 AM (or whenever it was) would the entire call be discounted?

somehow I doubt it. I don't remember, but I strongly doubt it.

this would have been 'revenue maximization', much like banks that will order your check deposits and outgoings to maximize any fees for bounced checks. Process the outgoings first, so if there's any fees to be had, you can rake 'em in.

LOL that would be like AOL in the 90s when people would log on and not log off...because it was so busy and because there was unlimited use pricing.

There was also the trick where "nights and weekends" minutes would start later and later. Initially they were so you werent doing long business calls on them. "Free Night" minutes would start at 5:30pm, then crept to 6pm then to 6:30pm and eventually to 7pm

Yes, even now you'll still see a notice in many places if they ask you to opt-in to receiving their text messages, notifying you that you may be charged for them. I guess some plans may still have limits.

And yep, they charged for calls you received too: You might get 500 minutes of talk time under a given plan, and incoming calls counted against that. I think my first cell phone plan in 2001 was about $50/month for 400 minutes, no texting because I couldn't afford a phone that supported it or the added cost in the plan.

Yes you used to pay for incoming calls as well. Now most plans are unlimited.

I guess the rationale was that there is no difference in the numbering plan in North America between cell phones and land lines. Calls to a cell phone cost more but the caller has no way to tell they’re calling one. So the caller pays the same to call a cell or a landline and the callee pays to receive the call too so that overall carriers get more money for completing allegedly more expensive cell minutes.

That's not true, there were definitely blocks of numbers which were and were not allocated to cell providers. Anyone implementing a "prefer landlines, fail over to cell" system was able to do so. Ask me how I know...

> Do they also charge you to receive phone calls haha?

Yes, that's how ridiculous the US and Canada systems are

The key word there is "competed".

Everyone is aware that it's not some benevolence of one company over another but actual market operation that brings down the prices. That's why Apple's ability to impose restrictions and take a 30% cut of unrelated transactions is concerning: there's no market for competing Apple stores.

(There have been telcos that tried to ban VOIP, but not in the West)

Decade ago I used 20GB monthly on 3G SIM. It was on plan mandated by Irish goverment to bring internet into rural areas. Sometimes you need regulations to break monopoly.

Fair, but what do you think of the discussion above. I lived thru all that. The discussion shows how bad things were. Then competition came in with amazing products. Now were' vilifying the competition for being too good.

I sort of remember somebody calculating back then that the total cost per byte of SMS messages exceeded the cost of the sending data through NASA's deep space network.

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