In Sweden, you’ve got two basic choices. Plan or pre-paid. Pre-paid doesn’t differ very much from elsewhere. But plans do. If you get a monthly plan with Tele2 (currently, the biggest operator) you get free calls and text to everyone else who has Tele2 – no matter if they’ve got plan or pre-paid. No matter if you send 2 or 2000 text-messages, and no matter if you call 2 min or 200 min – still free. Whenever I call outside Tele2, I pay 0.16 USD a minute,no matter if it’s to a landline or another cell. And most teens still think that’s quite expensive!

It was just very strange to see people so young using cell phones. What made it stranger was how quiet they were. They talked to each other, sure, but a few of them were looking at each other’s cell phones and others were quietly texting away.

I hope to someday get a cell phone with texting capability. It sounds worth it to be honest. The ability to IM without being tied to a computer… it makes me very happy.

Now to find a phone with IRC support, and I’m sold.

Recieving is generally free, unless you subscribe to some kind of news service. There you pay for recieving sms and these cost up to 0.50 CHF.

Therefore texting services are included in pretty much all plans.

I think also the other reason for texting being so cheap here is that calling is so expensive. A cellphone call is about $1.40 / US$1.06 per min on-peak for the prepaid plans that most teens are on – so the idea of 2,000 messages for $10 is pretty good. Thats over 65 messages sent a day!

To also help clarify, the person above who was forbidden not to make calls when staying at their family’s house in NZ was probably using a home-business landline which requires a $40/month line fee + 4cents per min for local calling. If you have a home-business, up untill recently you didnt qualify for a standard landline and free local calling. With the unbundling of telecom, this is rapidly changing.

In NZ if you have your landline with the same provider as your cellphone, you generally get a good deal now for unlimited calling between them (home-to-mobile) for about $10 per month. Otherwise its still around $1.40 / min.

Also to clarify on the schools accepting abbreviated spelling in high school exam essays, it is up to the school.
During your last 3 years of high school, each year you must get a certain amount of credits / points by passing modules in various topics from each subject you study. Half of these credits are earned during the year by exams or projects run by your school, and the rest are at the end of the year. Internal – run by school, external – run by national qualifications authority at the end of the year.
For internal exams, it is up to your school to decide if they wish to accept abbreviated spelling WHICH MOST DONT and for external exams, it has to be very, very limited. Also it is not allowed in english exams at all as these test your literacy and grammer. So the idea is to allow it in geography, math etc where grammer is not the most important concept that is being tested.

Text messaging is often used in trams, busses, subways in order not to harass other people with your call. Although it’s not a taboo to answer the mobile phone in public transport as it is in Japan.

In Europe we use two financing methods: prepaid and postpaid. These are the official telecom words for paying upfront (typically without contract) and paying afterward (commonly involving a contract). When your prepaid reached zero, no phone calls or text sending, receiving is still free. With postpaid you nowadays tend to have a so-called bundle that’s worth € X and from this you dedicate € Y for N text messages at a cheaper rate than when you go past the Nth message. Depending on your usage, if you have any minutes and/or messages left, you take them to the next month, so you have more messages and/or minutes.

PS: seems your blogging software is mishandling my euro-sign and creating a .notdef glyph in unicode output. The software is mishandling encoding.