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The Cultures of Texting In Europe and America
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The cultures of text messaging are very different in Europe and North America, according to an internet sociologist named Danah Boyd. Americans and Canadians have historically paid to receive text messages, but 'all-you-can-eat' data plans are beginning to change that. All-you-can-eat plans are still relatively rare in Europe. When a European youth runs out of texts and can't afford to top up, they simply don't text. But they can still receive texts without cost so they aren't actually kept out of the loop. What you see in Europe is a muffled fluidity of communication, comfortable but not excessive. "
In most countries you can tell whether a call is to a mobile or not from the number, and you can decide whether you want to pay to call a mobile. For example in Australia, mobile numbers start with 04, and in China mobile numbers start with 13. If a non-mobile number is forwarded to a mobile number, the owner of the forwarded number pays the mobile call rate (as opposed to the caller or the receiver).
Actually, no.
SMS messages use GSM control channels, not the main voice/data channels. Even worse, SMS messages compete for bandwidth with the other service messages (like 'make a call'). So too many SMS messages can easily crash operator's networks.
I'm in France and before the launching of the GSM, we had a analogue radiotelephone system (commercial name was "Radiocom 2000"). In the beginning of the 1990s, my father got one in his car, and the number he had was a local one (attached to our town, namely was beginning in 61, latter, with new numbering plan, it would be 05 61, or "geographical" when starting with 01-05). People who called him where paying a "normal" price (the monopolistic france telecom were running very excessive tarrifs at this moment), and he was charged of the price difference. Because of the local number he was allocated, the consumer was believing his call charged as a landline one. With the new numbering system, the "06" prefix was attached to mobile operations, pagers (still some), analogue, and the brand new GSM systems with a public (Itineris, aka France Telecom, finally named Orange) and a private operator (SFR). That prefix (and the ones like "08" for premium charged rates) are differently charged because they are not "geographic numbers". And so, GSM are not billed when they receive calls, but their correspondents are paying more, because they know that "06" is a mobile line. When "triple play" FAI started their box (namely, Free.fr, with internet, tv, and phone), the new phone line you got from their modem had a 087x number attributed. A very big problem, because Free was advertising that their number have a local tarrif everywhere they are called, but France Telecom (historical operator, still proprietary of all the landlines, concurrent with the Wanadoo/Orange brand) was attributing thoses numbers until 1998 the premium numbers. Because of the exploding demand onto these boxes, and to stop the confusion, since last years, all "degrouped" lines via triple-play FAI, have now 09 prefix. Don't think that Orange is raging about that : now they're happy because they hotlin have less angry phonecalls about inconsistent billings...
(Sorry my bad French) Je fais parler les Guignols de l'Info. Le pied, quoi.