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I remember that the US didn't really use SMS for a long time, but everybody in Europe did.

The US at the time had generous calling plans, and people there didn't yet discover the nice social effect of communicating silently (with texting).

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They used bait & switch in Europe (at least where I was) to entice SMS adoption. There was a multitude of free SMS services: online sites where you could send someone a message for free or SMS a service that would forward it without being charged. Then, in the span of a few weeks, the services disappeared.

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