I’ve lived under a rock for 10 years. I did Metro ages ago while most were still on contracts. Surely we’ve reached true capitalist open market freedom by now. Is it still total closed market, noncompetitive, privateering corruption?

    • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      It was easier before every random website wanted to send you a text with an OTP just to log in and order a pizza or whatever.

      That said, if it was $10 / mo for unlimited, or $0.02 per text, I’d take the per-text charge. I don’t use texts much and I’d probably save $8 / mo or more.

        • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          5 months ago

          Do you not? I really don’t know, I don’t use texts much and we’ve had unlimited texts for like, 15+ years. I always see ‘normal carrier fees apply’ on OTP notifications, so I just assumed they counted against limited plans.

          • Dasus@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            6
            ·
            5 months ago

            Finn here. For us, receiving SMS has never cost anything. Downloading MMS, that used to cost, but no-one uses those.

            Sending an SMS could be as expensive as 20c when I was a kid. And an SMS is 160 characters. So if you wrote a long one it’d send it as three.

            Then when I was about 12-13 there started being unlimited texting packages, which advertised as unlimited but after giving kids access to the service for a few months, limits were soon imposed to like a 1000 sms a month.

            • acetanilide@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              4
              ·
              5 months ago

              I can’t imagine being a teenager with only 1000 sms a month. I think at one point i was sending hundreds of texts per day

              • Zak@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                3
                ·
                5 months ago

                People in Europe switched to internet based messaging (mostly WhatsApp) as soon as smartphones got popular enough.

      • j4k3@lemmy.worldOP
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        5 months ago

        It should be more like $2 per gigabyte and everything streamlined as only data. Signal is a better service than any of the service providers offer anyways.