Why are the SMS limits orders of magnitude smaller than data limits bandwidth-wise?

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨nitroemdash@lemmy.wtf⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

A typical budget plan offers perks in roughly these proportions (per month):

15 GB of mobile data
10 hours of calls
200 SMS

It may be 300, 500, but I’ve never seen more than 1000 SMS even on 100 GB plans.

An SMS is limited to 160 bytes. Hence one GB of network bandwidth is equivalent to 6250000 SMS. 500 SMS limit is not even a thousandth of a percent dent on the mobile data limit.

What comes to phone calls, a single SMS could fit in half a second of audio dial-up way.

Why not increase the limit?

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Comments

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hanrahan@slrpnk.net ⁨18⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
what ? i get unlimited sms and calls ? I don’t think I’ve seen a plan with limited calls and sms for many a long year

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jdnewmil@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Because SMS is literally re-using bits dedicated to confirming that your cell phone is available for voice connections. There is a designed-in priority that has no room for expansion (since voice has priority in that scheme). To make your SMS connection look like it can handle stuff like photos, it uses the data connection as a side-band (“MMS”) and sometimes that fiction falls apart and the photos don’t come through with the sms it was supposed to be linked up with.

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- Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  SMS riding signalling side-channels is stuff from the old 2G days.
  Current 4G and 5G connections just use normal IP protocol to handle it, no re-use of protocol bits any more.
  So it’s not a scarce resource at all by now…
  Also, MMS is also increasingly a thing of the past. Most operators have already switched it off by now where I live.
  
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- tyler@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Huh? It’s not reusing bits. It’s using unused bits from the connection protocol. That’s why Asian countries have a smaller character limit. There’s zero reason whatever cell provider OP is talking (probably European) about couldn’t make it unlimited.
  
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  - jqubed@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I think the smaller character limit comes in from Asian countries if they don’t use the basic Latin characters that came out of ASCII. But yes, there’s no reason for the service provider not to offer unlimited SMS messages other than greed/lack of competition. I remember over 20 years ago reading a high level phone company employee talking about how the SMS plans were basically printing money for the phone companies because it cost them almost nothing in terms of bandwidth, utilizing an otherwise unused part of the connection protocol. Back then most companies charged for the messages as in @OP’s question, and the plans were relatively expensive. Nowadays most plans I see in the US and Europe offer unlimited talk and text, or limits that are so high they would be hard to reach. I think it’s a combination of competition and smart phones offering SMS alternatives that offer more functionality while using a tiny fraction of your data allowance, or none if you’re on WiFi.
    
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Paddy_NI@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Unlimited calls and texts have been standard now for years…

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- davidgro@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  In the US. I’m assuming OP is not in the US.
  
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Addition@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
Where are you living that has limits like this? I think the last time I had to worry about SMS limits was like 2013ish and that’s because I had a shitty tracphone. Unlimited calls and texting has been the default in the US for at least a decade.

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schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Oligopolies do whatever motivates people to give them more money, that’s why.

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Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
(*Insert confused guy meme here*)
“You guys have SMS limits?”

And also: Call time limits? Never have seen those since forever, as it is all just some form of VoIP nowadays anyway…

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bluGill@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
Because it is a budget plan. They are buying 2,000,000 SMS messages per month because 25 years ago with g1 and g2 protocols it made sense to sell them that way, and then trying to divide that between their 10,000 customers without running out. Similar for voice and data, they buy so much and divide between all customers.

Contracts could be sold a different way. However nobody wants to because the big companies want an option for budget minded people to get a little money out of them, while still giving them bad enough service that they all but the cheapest will run to the "big boys" with the unlimited plans. The budget companies need something they can sell that is cheaper than the "big boys", realistically they have exactly the same product and so somebody needs to introduce some artificial limit someplace to make it work.

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schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
I think because that’s what customers want. Very few customers send that many SMS messages, especially nowadays that Internet-based messengers have mostly replaced them; but a lot of customers want a large Internet data limit in order to watch short videos or things like that…

FWIW, looking at providers in my country, I found:

1500 minutes or SMS: www.yesss.at/en/tarife

1500 or 3000 minutes or SMS: www.s-budget-mobile.at/home

unlimited minutes or SMS: www.redbullmobile.at/tarife#Sim-Only-Tarife www.magenta.at/handytarife/tarife-ohne-handy#0 www.a1.net/handys-tarife/tarife-ohne-bindung www.drei.at/n/telefonie/tarife/sim-only-tarife

So your premise is not exactly true, at least not worldwide.
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AskewLord@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
because SMS isn’t data.

SMS is a 2G standard. Those networks were very limited in capacity compared to today, so SMS basically grew up with limited capacity and it’s a legacy hold over, and/or some carriers for a long time were still carrying SMS/phone over the older standard towers.

2G and 3G towers were only very recently retired, like 2022-2024, at least in the USA. In other parts of the world they are still active.

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