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Also traditionally American cellphone users pay to receive calls, which will blow the mind of a Britisher.

• rkomorn 1y ago
  And text messages. It was very shocking to me how many minutes cell phone plans had in the US when I moved there (it was ... a while ago) compared to France. But also: in the US, calling someone on their cell cost the same as calling someone on a land line. In France, calling someone on their cell from a land line was something like 4x more per minute. Really, the structure of phone costs (both land and cell) in the US was quite different.
  • hdgvhicv 1y ago
    In the 90s local calls and thus Internet was free in America, where in the U.K. it cost upto £5 an hour (in today’s money) to be online.
    • rkomorn 1y ago
      Yep. France was similar to the UK. I spent years online between 10pm and 6am to use our dialup at the off-hours cost (which wasn't free, but significantly cheaper). Not the good old days of spending money to browse the internet at 28.8kbps.
• palmotea 1y ago
  > Also traditionally American cellphone users pay to receive calls, which will blow the mind of a Britisher. IIRC, we had to pay for any kind of use on a cell phone use (both to make and receive calls), which is probably stemmed from them being considered premium devices when they were introduced, with a lot of expensive fixed infrastructure you'd use no matter the direction of the call.