If I remember correctly, the reason text messages were 140 characters was because cell phone data included 140 characters of unused space. So, beyond the implementation, there was virtually zero cost to the providers. And they charged per message.
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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Basically, yes. In the olden days, cell phones sent a ping at least once a minute to the nearest tower, and sometimes more often. The tower would respond with a similar message. There was a 140 character field in the ping that could be used for a variety of diagnostics and network controls. That field was also used for text messaging and so was pretty much free for the providers, other than the very small amount of general network backhaul overhead of sending that message to another phone. Charging for texts was a hell of a rip off.
It helps to think before hitting Send.
God, I hate those people who send off half a text, then a correction, then the other half, all within 5 seconds.
It was pretty bad back then when you would get charged for receiving all of those too.
Many services still have that warning too, so I can only assume there are still people getting charged per text received, including junk.
Receiving... texts? How can you even be charged for that when you can't affect what you receive?
Crazy, right? But the technology was brand new, and they got to make up the rules for a while.
Its legal and there was an effective oligopoly at the time
at the time
Due to RF constraints, there always will only be like 3 or 4 MNOs.
Hell, in ideal situation, I think a single carrier could be far better. Every carrier is going to have some unused bandwidth, and all of it could be added up.
Possibly we'd be doing quite well even with sub-1GHz. Let's say on 4G instead of one 10MHz channel in 800MHz, you'd do 2x20MHz for a total of 40MHz. Now, of course, everyone would be using that, but you'd have far less wasted bandwidth, because anyone would be able to use it too.
Unfortunately, that could just end up with the side effect of much larger websites. Same as with increased storage sizes and computation power the efficiency of programs just went down.
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Hah, it does seem like some people use their chats as drafts for their thoughts.
One concise message per issue is best. Separate messages are ok when starting a new topic.
Sorry, I don't remember in which places enter adds newline or just sends the message.
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In Europe, they kept this up even after most users had smartphones. And that's why WhatsApp is so successful there.
Same in many other places. Around 2015, I remember recharging with a prepaid package that gave me 100 messages/day. (I think it was like ₹10/day). I used to save from my lunch money so that I could text my then gf. Man, I was so happy when she finally got a smartphone.
Kids 2dy dnt knw hw gud de hv.
That's one expensive dot
I just refused to have texting back then. I worked for a phone company around that time and the bullshit they would charge for drove me crazy.
Moreso than you know. IIRC, cell phones had to constantly ping towers for service, and there was unused space in the packets for the pings, hence the 140 character limit. SMS simply piggybacked on the existing ping at no extra transmission cost to the carrier.
This is pretty close.
There was absolutely zero hit to their bandwidth for texts. Other than getting the software in place for it to work, there was almost no cost to them whatsoever.
Yep, an engineer in the late 80's said "hey, look at all this empty space in the management frames"... Frames that are continually sent when there's a connection, because it's a frame-based system. The space in the frames just happened to be... 144 characters worth.
Of course today SMS has to be simulated on 5G because it doesn't work like the CDMA based stuff (just like GSM had to do).
God I hate SMS. It's old, it's bad, it's unreliable (both in practice and technically).
SMS is still a lifesaver when you need to communicate with people who don't have a reliable data connection.
The problem is that SMS isn't reliable.
It has no error detection or correction. It's best-effort. There's not even validation between handset and tower. The phone encapsulates the message in the frames and sends them, assuming they arrive at the tower.
It's like shouting into a room and assuming the person got your message.
If connectivity is spotty, then SMS is spotty - and you have no idea if the other person didn't receive your message.
It's not really like that anymore on the newer networks.. Back 15 years ago, sure you'd miss texts or get them 4 days late, but I can't recall the last time a text went AWOL
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my plan was 25 cents for every text
that was so shitty. and we only had like...600 minutes to share among 6 people and we were paying over $800 a month for the whole plan. Back then you could feed a whole family at a fast food restaurant for like $6
My first plan was also .25 per text for the first 10 each day, then it dropped to .10 for the remainder. It was brutal.
My first plan cost me 25 cents to send or receive and you bet your ass I collected that from any friend that texted me stupid shit.
receive
Holy damn that is a terrible deal
I'm sure it made the rest of the plan more affordable, it was twenty years ago I don't remember. That one detail was egregious enough to etch in permanently.
"k" was the absolute worst and sometimes most expensive letter
Ask me about long distance
Remind me how those 10-10- services were supposed to work
I remember when they had to rush the ads out to tell everyone that just 10- wouldn't work any more, they now had to dial 10-10- first. For a period of time, every TV ad block was just solid ads for those damn services.
See also: the way I use the internet.
Playing Ultima Online on pay by the minute dial up when i still lived at home had my dad rightfully apoplectic every time the bill arrived 😬😄
Kal Vas Flam
I hardly use sms at all
And it was built on a diagnostic feature that end users were never supposed to be aware of.
The only way to keep that shit on lockdown was with prepaid cards. Can’t go nuts with texting if your phone stops receiving texts after you go through the $10/25/whatever you put on there
I know how to insert one or two line breaks into one SMS.
wow (send)
you're definitely not my coworker (send)
who's unable to complete (send)
a single sentence (send)
in our group chat (send)
without breaking it into ten to twenty (send)
messages (send)
I used to have an app installed that let me set up rules for notifications, so that whenever a notification with their name in the header would arrive, it would mute the conversation for the next 5 minutes, because otherwise my watch would vibrate for a minute or two straight.
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But after 5 and weekends were free.
Just gotta wait till 8pm
My first phone let me connect AIM and gave me a month of unlimited messages, the second month though, it was like $300 because aim just went over sms, that was an expensive lesson.
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