Does the USA have any open market cellular options that are legitimate pay-as-you-go and only for what you use options like Europe yet? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by j4k3@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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I've lived under a rock for 10 years. I did Metro ages ago while most were still on contracts. Surely we've reached true capitalist open market freedom by now. Is it still total closed market, noncompetitive, privateering corruption?

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[-] KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 3 points 6 months ago

Do you not? I really don't know, I don't use texts much and we've had unlimited texts for like, 15+ years. I always see 'normal carrier fees apply' on OTP notifications, so I just assumed they counted against limited plans.

[-] Dasus@lemmy.world 6 points 6 months ago

Finn here. For us, receiving SMS has never cost anything. Downloading MMS, that used to cost, but no-one uses those.

Sending an SMS could be as expensive as 20c when I was a kid. And an SMS is 160 characters. So if you wrote a long one it'd send it as three.

Then when I was about 12-13 there started being unlimited texting packages, which advertised as unlimited but after giving kids access to the service for a few months, limits were soon imposed to like a 1000 sms a month.

[-] acetanilide@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

I can't imagine being a teenager with only 1000 sms a month. I think at one point i was sending hundreds of texts per day

[-] Zak@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

People in Europe switched to internet based messaging (mostly WhatsApp) as soon as smartphones got popular enough.

this post was submitted on 28 May 2024

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