Comment by Tor3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tor3 | Hacker News Reader

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It's definitely in use in Europe, but it depends. I and my wife use SMS extensively, that's simply because we both use very cheap phone plans without a built-in data plan - i.e. no internet unless we have wi-fi (the pro side of that is that the yearly phone expenses is in the (equivalent of) low tens of dollars, not hundreds of dollars). When we're networked we use Line messaging.

My wife's boss communicates with all her employees by SMS (mass SMS - works like group communication, both ways).

AddEdit: Airlines send their notifications and links to boarding passes etc. via SMS. Dentist and doctor appointments, other public office appointments (e.g. my upcoming passport renewal), document notifications (from pension fund insurance companies for example), public warnings ("Toxic fire nearby - close your windows"), and more, are via SMS where I live.

Huh, how cheap is that? I’m almost always in wifi range, so I got the cheapest plan I could find in Germany (4€/month, so 48€/year), and even that still includes 1 GB of data (I do need the data, to sync my shopping list for example, but I’m curious how low one can go :D).

The cheapest (as in 0€/month) plan would probably be a SIM from Netzclub, but that's financed via advertisements. And then there was Congstar's "Prepaid wie ich will" (the 1st generation), which offered a "free messaging option" (1 GB / month, but only 32 kb/s) you could book every month. You just had to keep the SIM alive by topping up your credit by 15€ every 15 months (iirc). The unthrottled data options for this plan were expensive though.

I use discotel for years now, it is basically a prepaid with automated recharge from bank invoice on O2/Eplus. Thanks to being a prepaid you always got the option to switch you setup via packets every 30 days or 4 weeks (have to check that again, it was a fixed day amount and not based on calander months anymore).

So if I'm not traveling I stay with the cheapest data option for my occasionally otg stuff and on heavy travel months I choose larger packages, because I found myself using more often, for example as access point to notebook.

I also have an Kaufland (Telekom) Prepaid card, that said it would provide basic, very slow internet, for free so that text messages over chat works, bur I don't know if I got the wrong APN settings, it has problems in my second slot or it only works if you top it up regularly, but that internet and rest never really worked, even the account management over the website doesn't really work for me.

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