Originally Posted by
LordHamster
I didn't write, nor did I mean to mistakenly imply... that Europe didn't have SMS early on. My focus is on what differentiated the two regions to make everyone in Europe abandon SMS and switch to WhatsApp. The only factor I can conceive of has to be the pricing structure of SMS in Europe vs the USA at the time.
Due to the different US carriers using different technology and text message pricing being relatively cheaper than talk time for receiving communications,, SMS messaging was the way for people to communicate. Caller-pays In Europe for calls vs Caller&Receiver-pays in the US was a factor to some degree but the real driver was texting costs coming down tremendously in rhe US.