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Comment by kimi | Hacker News Reader

Not sure anybody ever used those. At -like- chf 1 a pop, they paved the way for WhatsApp to eat mobile telecom's lunch.

MMS was terrible, however people are fine paying 70 CHF/month for unlimited mobile internet nowadays. I find this ridiculous, personally I'm trying to condition myself to only use the 100MB of free monthly data, stricly messaging only. It's a challenge.

You can rather easily get "unlimited" (as far as I know, pretty much every operator caps at 40 GB/month) internet (in Switzerland only) for 20 CHF/month nowadays.

Except for very cheap MVNOs, no, there should be no cap with unlimited plans. You'll obviously suffer a bit from the QoS/prioritization but I know several people having no issues with unlimited 4G/5G from Salt, Yallo or Wingo.

Both my previous Yallo and my current Salt plans were unlimited, but restricted to 40GB before throttling in the terms and conditions. Maybe it has changed? (It's very hard to find detailed terms and conditions when looking at new contracts.)

I'm fairly certain Salt never enforced any throttling in practice, though it might be in the ToS?

Recent deals from Yallo mention throttling when roaming, but not in Switzerland where unlimited is really unlimited.

Or even a lot less if you're waiting for the special offers.

I have sunrise unlimited internet for 5 CHF/month (10 CHF without discount). Includes like 500 MB for roaming per month as well.

Yes, it's quite messed up. I pay CHF 80 / month (USD ~86) for cell phone service while at the same time I can get 25gbit synchronous fiber internet for CHF 64.75 / month (USD ~70).

For 80 CHF (60 if you're an inOne customer) you get a very high-end plan with extensive data roaming (40GB in a lot of countries) and international calls. Most people don't need that.

If you can do that kudos to you. Just yesterday I got a video on WA that was around 30MB and it was downloaded automatically. When you are in roaming WA is smart enough to not download it unless you click on it, but when you have a data connection in your home country you have no say (to the best of my knowledge).

There are settings to not download media files automatically even on WiFi. To download you click on it first, and you get to see how large the file is beforehand.

Here are the instructions on how to change that: https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/configuring-auto-down...

The formatting is messed up for me, so here's an third party alternative:

https://drfone.wondershare.com/whatsapp/how-to-stop-auto-dow...

Thanks!!!

So weird, I pay 13 eur a month for unlimited data...

there are various providers of unlimited data at around 30 CHF/month. I have yallo for 29. was some kinda lifetime rebate program.

Is it still like that in Switzerland? Here in Denmark I'd be hard pressed to find a plan without both free SMS and MMS, at least domestically.

In finland my plan has sms priced at 0.07e and mms at 0.40e. Unsurprisingly I've probably sent only a handful of mms in my lifetime.

In Germany you'll still pay 0.39€ / MMS even in otherwise unlimited-everything contracts. Needless to say it never was used widely. Personally I've only sent them very rarely and in almost all cases out of a misguided automated conversion, which I was never happy about.

It's weird how big the difference can be just across our border to the south, I wonder what sort of market forces that have caused this. It's not as if SMS/MMS services actually costs the telcos anything beyond the small amount of data in the messages.

I guess it does explain why people use apps like Telegram and WhatsApp while their usage is close to non-existent here.

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