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?


Over here the vast majority of carriers offer unlimited text and talk even once you hit the data limit
I wish it was the case here. When researching carriers in my country, I found an extremely bizarre tariff for the equivalent of 10 USD/month:
What is “+ 100 GB”, if data is already unlimited? Well, if you run out of hours or SMS, you are allowed to exchange some of your unused data for them, they are like currency. Could not find the rate, but usually it’s not bandwidth-proportional.
Probably either 100GB before throttling (i.e. 100GB fast + unlimited slow) or unlimited on phone, 100GB on hotspot.No, I read the terms, it is what I wrote. They allow you to exchange them for calls.
Oh, I somehow read your comment as asking the question and not answering it. My bad.
Yeah, “unlimited” … as many as the allocated bandwidth will allow. But since the SMS is squeezed in between voice that is a very limited resource.
SMS isn’t squeezed in between voice. It’s literally part of the payload a cell phone uses to tell a tower it’s connected to it. “Hey tower! This is cell phone imei blah blah blah, also since I have some more room on this letter here’s a little poem for you “