They used to charge serious money for it, that would have allowed them the budget to fix enough of the bugs that SMS is now pretty damned good. Culture is also

They used to charge serious money for it, that would have allowed them the budget to fix enough of the bugs that SMS is now pretty damned good. Culture is also a large part of it, it's embedded in telcos to such a degree that I and my parents use rather expensive and fairly slow AT&T DSL because its rock solid, every one of my friends and family who use cablecos for Internet have a tremendously higher rate of problems. Cablecos come from a culture where a customer or neighborhood losing connectivity for hours or a day or two wasn't the "end of the world".