No idea where you are, but I have experience with European services, US and Canadian. In all of them Unlimited calls and texts are the first perk to come along, even at a weedly 200MB data plan.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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Where in the world even has plans like that anymore? You must be in the third world?
Sorry bro your phone carrier is a greedy ass
I haven't seen a limited SMS plan in around a decade here in Canada, so this post is wild to me.
US here, what few cheap limited SMS/call plans that I have seen in that time wouldn't give you anywhere near 15 GB of data, more like 1-2. But those plans seem very rare these days.
what ? i get unlimited sms and calls ? I don't think I've seen a plan with limited calls and sms for many a long year
Because SMS is literally re-using bits dedicated to confirming that your cell phone is available for voice connections. There is a designed-in priority that has no room for expansion (since voice has priority in that scheme). To make your SMS connection look like it can handle stuff like photos, it uses the data connection as a side-band ("MMS") and sometimes that fiction falls apart and the photos don't come through with the sms it was supposed to be linked up with.
SMS riding signalling side-channels is stuff from the old 2G days.
Current 4G and 5G connections just use normal IP protocol to handle it, no re-use of protocol bits any more.
So it's not a scarce resource at all by now...
Also, MMS is increasingly a thing of the past, too. Most operators have already switched it off by now where I live.
And sms limits are from the old days. I have no idea where would have sms limits, unless it’s a third world/developing country.
Huh? It’s not reusing bits. It’s using unused bits from the connection protocol. That’s why Asian countries have a smaller character limit. There’s zero reason whatever cell provider OP is talking (probably European) about couldn’t make it unlimited.
I think the smaller character limit comes in from Asian countries if they don’t use the basic Latin characters that came out of ASCII. But yes, there’s no reason for the service provider not to offer unlimited SMS messages other than greed/lack of competition. I remember over 20 years ago reading a high level phone company employee talking about how the SMS plans were basically printing money for the phone companies because it cost them almost nothing in terms of bandwidth, utilizing an otherwise unused part of the connection protocol. Back then most companies charged for the messages as in @OP’s question, and the plans were relatively expensive. Nowadays most plans I see in the US and Europe offer unlimited talk and text, or limits that are so high they would be hard to reach. I think it’s a combination of competition and smart phones offering SMS alternatives that offer more functionality while using a tiny fraction of your data allowance, or none if you’re on WiFi.
Unlimited calls and texts have been standard now for years...
In the US, some parts of Europe, etc. I'm assuming OP is not in one of those areas.
Edit: Updated geography.
I'm not in the US either....
"US defaultism refers to the tendency for people, particularly those in the United States, to assume that the US is the default or only relevant context when discussing various topics."
Funnily enough @davidgro@lemmy.world suspected you of having been displaying US defaultism ;-)
Your sentence makes no sense, are you speaking on someone else's behalf voicing an imagined opinion you think they have?
@davidgro@lemmy.world pointed out to you that OP might not be an US citizen, so suspected you to be one, ignorant of the fact that other people outside the US exist.
And you then replying to that with the US defaultism quote is funny.
I made zero assumption about whether op was in the US or not. I simply responded to @davidgro@lemmy.world US defaultism.
You ironically just provided another example of US defaultism 🤣
Interesting. What country are you in? Whenever SMS comes up on the Internet usual people mention it being a US thing almost exclusively.
Whenever SMS comes up on the Internet usual people mention it being a US thing almost exclusively. You are sure? Never experienced it that way.
After all, SMS is originally an European cellular standard and has been huge thing there for decades.
It's usually in the context of there not being a single app alternative (like WhatsApp or that one China uses) which took off before SMS became unlimited here, so SMS is the default if you want to exchange text messages with someone or if a company does.
Please tell me you're joking...
Well, I suppose I could actually pay attention to your username.
Yep Northern Ireland is not a US state thankfully 🤪
Over here the vast majority of carriers offer unlimited text and talk even once you hit the data limit
I wish it was the case here. When researching carriers in my country, I found an extremely bizarre tariff for the equivalent of 10 USD/month:
- Unlimited mobile data + 100 GB
- 16 hours 40 minutes of call time, except to same carrier customers
- 100 SMS
What is "+ 100 GB", if data is already unlimited? Well, if you run out of hours or SMS, you are allowed to exchange some of your unused data for them, they are like currency. Could not find the rate, but usually it's not bandwidth-proportional.
Yeah, "unlimited" ... as many as the allocated bandwidth will allow. But since the SMS is squeezed in between voice that is a very limited resource.
SMS isn’t squeezed in between voice. It’s literally part of the payload a cell phone uses to tell a tower it’s connected to it. “Hey tower! This is cell phone imei blah blah blah, also since I have some more room on this letter here’s a little poem for you “
(*Insert confused guy meme here*)
"You guys have SMS limits?"
And also: Call time limits? Never have seen those since forever, as it is all just some form of VoIP nowadays anyway...
Where are you living that has limits like this? I think the last time I had to worry about SMS limits was like 2013ish and that's because I had a shitty tracphone. Unlimited calls and texting has been the default in the US for at least a decade.
Oligopolies do whatever motivates people to give them more money, that's why.
The 'why' with companies is almost always 'because people will pay for it."
Increasing the limit doesn't make them more money.
Because it is a budget plan. They are buying 2,000,000 SMS messages per month because 25 years ago with g1 and g2 protocols it made sense to sell them that way, and then trying to divide that between their 10,000 customers without running out. Similar for voice and data, they buy so much and divide between all customers.
Contracts could be sold a different way. However nobody wants to because the big companies want an option for budget minded people to get a little money out of them, while still giving them bad enough service that they all but the cheapest will run to the "big boys" with the unlimited plans. The budget companies need something they can sell that is cheaper than the "big boys", realistically they have exactly the same product and so somebody needs to introduce some artificial limit someplace to make it work.
I think because that's what customers want. Very few customers send that many SMS messages, especially nowadays that Internet-based messengers have mostly replaced them; but a lot of customers want a large Internet data limit in order to watch short videos or things like that...
FWIW, looking at providers in my country, I found:
- 1500 minutes or SMS: https://www.yesss.at/en/tarife
- 1500 or 3000 minutes or SMS: https://www.s-budget-mobile.at/home
- unlimited minutes or SMS: https://www.redbullmobile.at/tarife#Sim-Only-Tarife https://www.magenta.at/handytarife/tarife-ohne-handy#0 https://www.a1.net/handys-tarife/tarife-ohne-bindung https://www.drei.at/n/telefonie/tarife/sim-only-tarife
So your premise is not exactly true, at least not worldwide.
because SMS isn't considered data originally, now it is.
SMS is a 2G standard. Those networks were very limited in capacity compared to today, so SMS basically grew up with limited capacity and it's a legacy hold over, and/or some carriers for a long time were still carrying SMS/phone over the older standard towers.
2G and 3G towers were only very recently retired, like 2022-2024, at least in the USA. In other parts of the world they are still active.
Unlimited SMS only became a think once 4G was around, at least here.