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?
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.
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.