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Phone calls are essentially dead technology, kept alive by people who can't or won't install an app. Thus the price is whatever squeezes out the most revenue ou
by zarzavat 5y ago
Phone calls are essentially dead technology, kept alive by people who can't or won't install an app. Thus the price is whatever squeezes out the most revenue out of the residual users until the well runs dry.
In some countries this process is happening faster than in others.
Entire economies have been built on the principle that the price of a call or message is 0 and you only pay for data used (if any). That is the future that is coming, even for the US, but it might take a few more decades there.
- vxNsr 5y agoBut don’t you see what you’re saying? If the phone companies (TMobile, Verizon, etc) offered competitive pricing these apps/internet services wouldn’t exist! We would all happily pay Verizon the reasonable fees, instead they try to milk us and end up losing our business entirely.
- baud147258 5y agonot necessarily, because WA offers options that normal calls and text don't, like group conversations/calls, easier documents and picture sharing and video calls. I mean I have rather affordable texts for my usual correspondents, but I'm mostly using WA to chat with them
- baud147258 5y agore-reading this, when I said "rather affordable texts", I should have said that I've got unlimited texts for contacts in the country, as part of my subscription (5€, got also 2 hours of call and 100 Mo per month)
- vxNsr 5y agoWhat’s stopping the phone companies from offering that? The point is that they’ve chosen to not innovate.
- herbst 5y agoI and my partner have several telephone packages that allow practically unlimited calling within Europe (which we regularly do) yet we mostly use Telegram and Signal because they are more comfortable. Edit:// in my phone I even have a internet only SIM, without number attached.