An industry based on missed calls helped bring India online

I would encourage any North American or European interested in this sort of thing to go buy a $45 Android phone from aliexpress (or two or three different models, if you're really interested) to see first hand what the very low end of the mobile data smartphone market looks like these days.

There are some things out there based on reference mediatek chipset designs that are remarkably not terrible relative to their price. Create a new fake named gmail/google account on one, install some apps from the play store, mess around with it.

randomly chosen example: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001470142781.html?spm=a2...

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001586490693.html?spm=a2...

I bring this up because I remember arranging similar things with my parents as a child. The walk home from school was moderately long for a kid (4 ish miles) and if it was raining it was uttterly miserable. So I could shelter in the railway station and call home for a lift - but I rarely had the money and hell it was two bags of crisps for a single call. So two missed calls in a row while it was raining was signal to my mum "come get me at the station!"

I think I am saying that I am old enough that I span generational shifts in wealth.

Pre mobile phones (but post caller I’d) my wife and I called each other several times a day just to say mushy things to each other. It was ok to ignore the call but an immediate second call meant “actually I need to speak with you”. I’m sure others must have invented the same system.

But I love ZipDial‘s idea to take it to another level.

The European idea to make receiving GSM calls free was brilliant. The US’s idea that “the person with the radio pays the extra fee” held back mobile adoption in the US by a decade.

It's 2021 and I'm in Europe, and I still use missed calls for calling my family abroad. Typically goes like this:

- I call them on Whatsapp, but their Android phone is sleeping so they don't receive the call notif on Whatsapp

- I send a missed call via GSM to wake their phone

- They call back on Whatsapp

International calls are still expensive even within EU, while huge data packages are included in even cheap monthly subs. I can't comprehend the GSM operators' logic.

I remember the same being the case in Poland years ago. "Sending an arrow" was a cheap way of communicating with other people, and it was a savoir-vivre violation to answer a phone that rung for less than five seconds because it could charge someone for a full minute of voice connection even if it was only meant to be an "arrow".

In my experience even many decades ago in the US, the "ring" that the caller hears in their handset before the recipient picks up is not actually from the "bell" of the recipient's handset; rather, I understand, it is generated at the caller's local switching station. And there's no system-wide synchronization of these ring signals. So, if the recipient hears N actual rings, the caller may have heard N-1, N, or N+1. Does anybody who used these signaling schemes have experiences where the wrong message (or none at all) got communicated?

My family used a 1-bit missed call signaling system in Brooklyn in the 1950’s. Both -one and -two ring missed calls indicated prearranged messages, generally “arrived safely” or “leaving now.” Back then, poorer families had party telephone lines, too.

We even had a term for this: 'beacon': the phones were expensive,the tariffs even more so and most kids had very low call credit most of the time. So if you have almost no credit left, you call someone, hang up quickly and they suppose to call you back.

I really don't understand the article. So in 2003 cellular minutes were expensive. Fair enough. But then we jump to 2010-2016. No information on pricing of calls then, or more importantly, SMS messages...

So a missed-call was free. Okay. But was a single SMS message in 2010-2016 really prohibitively expensive? Because it seems to me that a single SMS number, to which you can send a single SMS with an unlimited number of codes in the body to sign-up for various services, is more efficient than a dedicated phone number for each individual service one might want to sign-up for.

And we are also left to assume that incoming SMS and calls were free.

Today this is made obselete by JIO.

Either you don't have a plan then you can't call anyone or even do a missed call or you've a plan then you can call anyone and you don't need a missed call as unlimited talktime is offered with all plans.

But a basic plan is only $2.1 dollar or so.

Clogged 30% of national operators capacity without giving a penny That's hell of a deal