And text messages.

It was very shocking to me how many minutes cell phone plans had in the US when I moved there (it was ... a while ago) compared to France.

But also: in the US, calling someone on their cell cost the same as calling someone on a land line. In France, calling someone on their cell from a land line was something like 4x more per minute.

Really, the structure of phone costs (both land and cell) in the US was quite different.

In the 90s local calls and thus Internet was free in America, where in the U.K. it cost upto £5 an hour (in today’s money) to be online.

Yep. France was similar to the UK. I spent years online between 10pm and 6am to use our dialup at the off-hours cost (which wasn't free, but significantly cheaper).

Not the good old days of spending money to browse the internet at 28.8kbps.

> Also traditionally American cellphone users pay to receive calls, which will blow the mind of a Britisher.

IIRC, we had to pay for any kind of use on a cell phone use (both to make and receive calls), which is probably stemmed from them being considered premium devices when they were introduced, with a lot of expensive fixed infrastructure you'd use no matter the direction of the call.