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by l0nwlf 5575 days ago
Yes, they do. In India the average price of sending an SMS is 1 rupee, the same as making a call for 60 seconds.

EDIT: Which carrier ? Unless you buy SMS pack, the default rate per SMS is rupee 1. Am talking about Airtel and BSNL. I think the article too mentions this. Quoting it: "The wireless companies all told Kohl's antitrust committee that while the price of individual texts was going up, consumers were paying far less per text by buying huge bundles for flat rates."
2 comments
statictype 5575 days ago
Seriously? I live in India and I get something like 3000 free messages a month. (I don't think I use more than 150 of those).

I'm under the impression that local messaging in India is practically free.

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statictype 5575 days ago
I'm using Airtel. I have no idea what my actual scheme is but I do know that I hardly pay anything on local text messages. And almost everyone I know in India (regardless of carrier) has a similar deal where the cost of sms is, as they say, a rounding error.

The exception is when they charge extra on holidays. I guess that part is a bit of a racket, though a more benign explanation would be that they're just trying to keep the network traffic to a maintainable level on those days.

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kingsley_20 5575 days ago
Having just moved back to India, and having researched SMS rates/recharge behaviour for an app I'm building, you're getting a bad deal. The bad deal is the default in India, but knowledge of how to fix that is so widespread, and fixing it is so easy that effective SMS prices are closer to Rs0.02-0.05.
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