I think now pretty much every plan has free domestic phone calls. International calls, you still pay per minute?
Anyway, back then even domestic calls on a cell phone you paid by minute. Even for local calls. Unlike landline where the local call would be free.
Then some plans started introducing unlimited free calls after some time of day, 9pm as this suggests.
Which made sense probably since people using their cell phone for business were no longer putting load on the network after business hours. And young broke people like myself at the time, who were not using their phone for business, could then use the network without the extra fees. The carrier can offer this additional perk, they can get more customer sign ups, and it’s not hurting them since the network load was lower long after business hours.
Then when texts came around they costed extra, just for funsies. Limited number with possibly massive fees for going over. Yet the texts took up no real room that the phones weren’t already using to communicate with towers
Here in the UK, I used to read about Americans having free local calls in the computing mags. We had to pay local rate for our dial up. We had to wait till weekends and evenings to get off peak call rates. Freeserve was the first ISP here that gave no subscription charges for dial up.
They later brought in something called Freeserve Hometime, which iirc was freephone dial up during off peak. I renamed the icon to Freeserve Downtime, because we used to get connection issues. No one in my family thought it was funny.
“Sorry, got d/c’d”
“Gotta go, my mum wants to use the phone”
I think now pretty much every plan has free domestic phone calls. International calls, you still pay per minute?
Anyway, back then even domestic calls on a cell phone you paid by minute. Even for local calls. Unlike landline where the local call would be free.
Then some plans started introducing unlimited free calls after some time of day, 9pm as this suggests.
Which made sense probably since people using their cell phone for business were no longer putting load on the network after business hours. And young broke people like myself at the time, who were not using their phone for business, could then use the network without the extra fees. The carrier can offer this additional perk, they can get more customer sign ups, and it’s not hurting them since the network load was lower long after business hours.
Then when texts came around they costed extra, just for funsies. Limited number with possibly massive fees for going over. Yet the texts took up no real room that the phones weren’t already using to communicate with towers
Oh my god, they would charge per text, including texts that you’ve received.
So you’d be charged if someone you don’t even know sent you an SMS lol
Here in the UK, I used to read about Americans having free local calls in the computing mags. We had to pay local rate for our dial up. We had to wait till weekends and evenings to get off peak call rates. Freeserve was the first ISP here that gave no subscription charges for dial up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeserve
They later brought in something called Freeserve Hometime, which iirc was freephone dial up during off peak. I renamed the icon to Freeserve Downtime, because we used to get connection issues. No one in my family thought it was funny.
“Sorry, got d/c’d” “Gotta go, my mum wants to use the phone”
Good times. I miss old school Internet.
We had unlimited night data plans here in India for some time. Might still be available in some places.