Originally Posted by nkedel

The industry is rapidly moving to unlimited domestic calling and unlimited texting being the norm.

As for paying for airtime (including on incoming calls) on older plans, there's a very good reason for it; the original AMPS phone system developed at a time when mobiles were quite rare, airtime quite expensive, and ground lines has already crossed into being ubiquitous and local calling very cheap in most parts of the country (or already flat rate, in some.)

People HERE would have rioted had they had to pay the kind of premium people in some other countries had to back in the earlier days of mobiles(*) to call from a landline to a mobile as it it were a long distance call, and there was no particular interest in starting new area codes for mobile numbers as some other countries have done(**).

IOW, in the ground-line-centric world of the terminal-1970s, and early 1980s, it made perfect sense that the mobile phone subscriber should be the one to bear the extra costs.

These days, it's an irrelevance; unless you're on the very cheapest of fixed-cost prepaid plans, or roaming internationally, the marginal cost of additional airtime is a triviality.

(* judging from higher international calling rates, that was still the case in the first few years of the millenium.)

(** the engineering to expand NANP to more area codes, and to allow overlay area codes being a long way off at the time this was being originally built out... it would be relatively trivial today.)