Comment by jlund-molfese
3 years ago
We do generally pay extra for international calls, though text messaging is often free (assuming you’re talking about international states. US states, of course, are all treated as the same country).
Almost all phone plans have unlimited (domestic) texting and calling and differentiate themselves with data, reliability and ”free” perks like subsidized Netflix. You really have to go out of your way to find a plan with limited texts/calls.
It's actually mostly some parts in central Europe where texting is expensive. For most parts of the world texting is quite important.
I don't understand why people on this board keep forgetting that central Europe and the US is the minority of the world population.
Everyone keeps bringing up WhatsApp. But it seems that everyone has all but forgotten that WhatsApp became so popular not because they only focused on the US market, but because they went around the globe and specifically targeted feature phones as well. I.e. they understood that their own home turf isn't enough to make a dominant chat application.
> I don't understand why people on this board keep forgetting that central Europe and the US is the minority of the world population.
Did you mean to reply to a different comment? Mine was a reply to the GP, to answer the very narrow questions he asked about the US.
The death of SMS is hardly specific to central Europe and the US. It's already thoroughly dead in most of Asia for person-to-person communication, replaced by WhatsApp/WeChat/LINE/Telegram/etc depending on country.
That's incorrect. Dead for person-to-person communication in east Asia yes, but still EXTREMELY common for everything else.
"It doesn't matter for the use cases I don't care about" - what a selfish look at the world.
Besides paying for parking by SMS and other services in Europe there's also M-Pesa and similar services[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
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