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Comment by swozey | Hacker News Reader

I'm 39 and SMS not being unlimited was a huge thing. I never thought it would be unlimited, when that happened (Suncom? I forget who started it) it was huge. This was a LONG time ago though, long before WhatsApp. Probably 15-18 for me.

I remember a lot of conversations in high school going "My plans maxed out can you text $friend?" IIRC you had to specifically turn off receiving texts or they'd charge you for each one and we were broke HS kids.

edit: Oh that article posted above is 2007. I guess it lasted way longer than I thought.

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I'm 21 and from Germany, I absolutely remember paying for sms in the first years of my highschool time.

I can also remember killing my data plan browsing Instagram while skipping my French class ... So about 7 years ago?

Yes, I think I got my first iPhone around 2010, and at the time I was still on limited text message plan. I don't think I got unlimited texts until 2014 or something.

Damn 2014?? My years are all skewed nowadays.

I think he's in the minority because everyone I knew had unlimited SMS by the mid-00s before the iPhone was released.

The unlimited plans existed, but it was more expensive than the limited plan I used, since I didn't go over the limit.

There were big variations by carriers - that certainly wasn’t ubiquitous by the time the iPhone was released, because iMessage sidestepping it was important to enough people that everyone mentioned it in their reviews. For example:

> Besides ease of use, there's another side benefit to this seamless integration. If you send messages regularly to iOS 5 users, you may be able to switch to a cheaper texting plan from your carrier. Assuming you send messages exclusively to iOS 5 users, you may one day be able to ditch a texting plan altogether.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/06/more-upcoming-ios-5-...

I don't doubt that SMS were not always unlimited in the US.

But the question here is: Were there any (reasonably popular) plans that provided data for smartphones, but not unlimited texting? If not, that couldn't have been a factor in the adoption of iMessage in the US.

If you had wifi at home/work/school, you could send and receive without incurring any data usage at all.

True, but at least in the case of iMessage, that would also mean not being able to text all while not within Wi-Fi coverage (since Apple absolutely refuses to let people actually send an SMS to a number it considers to be participating in iMessage).

No; the iPhone launched with data plans. It just wasn't unlimited, nor were the texts. Sending an iMessage cost a lot less than ten cents of data; you could send/receive a lot more of them within your plan without overages.

(IIRC, my plan with Cingular didn't have any texts built-in, so they were 10¢ a pop, in each direction. I could send many thousands within the data plan's couple of gigabytes.)

> since Apple absolutely refuses to let people actually send an SMS to a number it considers to be participating in iMessage

Are you sure? I remember iMessage falling back to SMS if for some reason it can’t get through on iMessage.

I had a work blackberry on verizon that had unlimited data and no free sms texts. We used BBM and Google Voice to avoid paying sms fees

It’s not a factor at all. By the time smartphones and data plans came out, they all included unlimited texts. I’m sure there was a small carrier here and there but AT&T didn’t offer it with the first iPhone. This is US specific.

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