Phone packages before everything went unlimited

[Trabbling]

Hi, I'm going to be talking to my students about how phone packages used to be done - a certain number of minutes, certain number of text messages (remember them?!), certain amount of data, but I can't remember or find any details on what the offers / costs used to be.

Just wondering can anyone with a better memory than me help?

Circa 2007. Vodafone- spend £5 of credit in a week for unlimited calls and texts at the weekend. Time limit was 59 mins though so you’d hang up and then carry on the call.
texts were 10p so you had to send 50 texts in a week- i probably do that a day now!

I think my first phone contract (1999) was Vodaphone £8 a month. No internet. 250 minutes. 100 texts.

My first phone in 1999 was a plan from Orange called Everyday 20. You could phone other Orange phones or landlines for 20 minutes per day for free, and then texts and anything over that allowance were charged for - think texts were 10p? By the following summer it had gone up to Everyday 50, and I think you could buy text message bundles to reduce the cost a bit.

You'd also pay for your phone through your package/plan.

I was one 1-2-1 PAYG in 1999. I had 50p "line rental" deducted per day in exchange for "cheap" calls which were 10p per minute during peak hours (9am - 6pm if I recall correctly) and 2p per minute off-peak. My text messages were 10p each or free to other 1-2-1 users. I thought this package was an amazing deal and used to spend an hour on the phone to my boyfriend every night for the bargain price of £1.20!

I don't remember the pricing but I do remember the horror of going over the hour on a call and realising you'd be charged for it rather than hanging up after 59 minutes

Vodaphone used to do pay for the first three minutes and get the rest of the hour for free, think it was about 35p per minute 😲

Weren’t texts measured by individual digits rather than words at one point?

My first phone in about 1995 was pay as you go and 35p per minute or per text.

My Nokia would only store I think 100 texts so you had to delete the old ones.

But I still use it sometimes and the battery lasts for up to 5 days!

Some phones would store 10 or 20 texts. A favourite prank when I was at college in 2001 was to go online and send 1000 anonymous texts to someone's number. They'd be there for days deleting them. 🤣

Not everything is 'unlimited' now though - there are plenty of packages with limits, and some people use PAYG.

Or you can get packages with unlimited social media, but limits on other data use.
Maybe the big difference is that calls and texts volume used to be all-important, but now we focus more on data.

Nb the unlimited still isn't even that, there's always a fair use policy.

Everyday 50 - but weren’t the free minutes only after 6pm…? Maybe?!

Phone contracts only used to be 12 months long. The notion of mid-contract price rises didn’t exist. I also remember with Orange that every year you recontracted, you got a 5% loyalty discount.

Those were the days!

I still have data limits ,najd I think that's very common. I'm sure my family are the same. I don't think I have unlimited call minutes on phone calls either though the limit is so big I never use it
I also have to pay if I send photos and links via texts instead of what's app though I can send unlimited texts

My first day phone contract in 1998 didn’t include free text messages at all; they cost 5p each to send. I think I got 100 minutes of free calls. No data because this was before the days when you could access the internet on a phone.

Bt cellnet was 10p a text iirc and 3p a text to other bt phones. And text length was capped, hence the need for txtspk. Getting creative with words when you just overran to the second message to save yourself the extra 10p is a fond memory

10 years later living away from home for the first time, I remember getting a Vodafone deal for a phone + 300 mins, 500 texts and unlimited calls to landlines + a PS3 for £30 ish a month. I was pretty pleased with myself at the time so I could call my mum all the time without keeping an eye on how many minutes I had left. I gave my brother the PS3 for Xmas

Also remember paying per minute to use the internet, and companies finally getting it down to 1p/min with great fanfare. Then going on Neopets and it taking 5 minutes to load each page

When I first started work in the early 90s I had to travel around the UK quite a bit so got a mobile phone to carry for emergency use. It was too big to fit in my hand bag and the contract cost me a small amount each month plus a charge for any calls (no texts then). I can't remember exact costs but I think probably about £1 per minute.

A few years later I remember thinking it was amazing that I could get a contract with 250 'minutes' included in the basic monthly cost. I think I paid about £20 per month. Any extra calls cost a lot and I remember having an itemised bill each month showing what numbers I had called, how long for and whether this was from my included minutes or charged as extra (not all numbers could be included).Pay as you go was available but topping up was a bit of a faff (I think it involved paying in a shop or possibly a cash machine).
When texts became common I moved to a contract with a set number of texts also included and any extras were 10p per text. Each text was limited to a certain number of characters and if you went over the message was sent as multiple texts so people shortened messages. I think this is where 'text speak' started (eg L8R would be 3 characters but 'later; would use 5).
I remember in the late 90s seeing a friend use his mobile to make a call from his living room and thinking that it was incredibly decadent of him to do this rather than getting up to use the landline phone in the kitchen.
By the early 2000s I remember paying about £30 a month for a 24 month contract that included lots of texts (but not unlimited) and 350mins of calls per month plus a nokia phone. I thought this was a great deal. At that time there were lots of mobile phone intermediary companies marketing contracts with many different providers (rather than just going direct to, say vodafone etc) and they often offered 'free gifts' for signing up to a contract. As a pp mentioned, we got a games consol this way once and and TV another time.

For context, I now pay £10 per month for unlimited calls and texts plus more data than I will ever use.

Thanks everyone ☺️

Yes! It was characters, I remember as a teenager having to remove spaces / write in shorthand to keep to the character limit two messages and cost me 20p instead of 10p!

"Jst wlking bk 4m skl b home in 20.wats 4 dinner?x"

If you want to go back to the 1980s when the first mobile networks were launched, you had to pay to receive calls as well as make them.

There's still a certain amount of data!

Orange launched in 1994 with bundles that were something like Talk 15 which included 15 minutes of calls for £15. I seem to remember that to start with text messages were either free or you could add them for £1. They were maybe unlimited or you could use a lot before the network cottoned on to it and you had them as part of the package or paid for every one you sent.

As recently as 2019 we had a phone account for several business handsets and received these monthly invoices.

When I got my first phone (BT Mobile) probably around 2000 it cost 10p to send a text message. Calls cost 10p/min to someone on my network, 15p/Mon to a landline or 40p/min to someone on a different network.

Remembering who also had a phone on your network was a real concern. I seem to remember that calls were more expensive before 6pm as well.