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> Accounts with per SMS billing were unlikely to have mobile data for comfortable Whatsapp usage, so I doubt that was the substitution. Care to quantify that?
by sangnoir 4y ago
> Accounts with per SMS billing were unlikely to have mobile data for comfortable Whatsapp usage, so I doubt that was the substitution.
Care to quantify that? PAYG SMS was/is consistently way more expensive than PAYG data[1] in every country I have visited; granted I haven't been to many countries, but I've visited most continents. IIRC, there's a 2-3 orders of magnitude difference in the costs-per-140-bytes sent.
Per WhatsApp message, which ends up being a few KiB per day for text only
- liotier 4y agoAt the time of the rise of Viber and then Whatsapp, for people in Africa or communicating with Africa the messaging substitution wasn't an important question at all: we were burning so much money with international calls (and SMS) that any other tradeoff was a rounding error.