3 ms·
First off, although apparently a recent thread on HN showed others have more problems than me, I don´t pay for texting; I use a combination of IM and Google Voi
by jawee 16y ago
First off, although apparently a recent thread on HN showed others have more problems than me, I don´t pay for texting; I use a combination of IM and Google Voice with my smartphone to get the job done on one bill.
However, I was travelling in a Latin American country recently and was talking to one fellow who worked for the government who had been given a Blackberry Storm (it was the only smartphone I had seen there). I asked him about his data plan; he said he got 5MB a month that he basically just used for texting, e-mailing, and checking Facebook. Apparently this was some kind of combined plan, or he was mistaken one.
- dedward 16y agoI live in a latin american country THere is a fee for local calling (based on time only) and a fee for sending SMS (based on # of messages), and in the regular (only?) phone plan (which is about $8/mo I think) there are enough minutes/messages included in the plan that I never see more then a dollar or two in extra fees. There's the blackberry plan on top of that (going away soon when my new iPhone arrives, yay) - but htat doesn't change SMS or Calling preferences - just adds unlimited data and the usual blackberry services. Teh reason SMS & Data are different, historically, is because they are different. SMS was a way to cram a message in a single GSM packet. Very low-cost for the network to send. This was prior to data plans being available. No sustained network protocol for the end user -that's why there's a small character limit - it had to fit in a single packet. Providers globally reap huge profits on SMS, because actually sending SMS cost them nothing additional. Data, OTOH, ends up costing them actual real bandwidth and resources