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?
because SMS isn’t considered data originally, now it is.
SMS is a 2G standard. Those networks were very limited in capacity compared to today, so SMS basically grew up with limited capacity and it’s a legacy hold over, and/or some carriers for a long time were still carrying SMS/phone over the older standard towers.
2G and 3G towers were only very recently retired, like 2022-2024, at least in the USA. In other parts of the world they are still active.
Unlimited SMS only became a think once 4G was around, at least here.