Those are interesting points. I think I’m unaware of how many places there are without a proper data connection. I guess The Netherlands being this small has its benefits! Granted I haven’t traveled everywhere in the Netherlands but whenever I travel somewhere I have a proper connection.

While you are right that sms is the simplest form of messaging a phone can provide, I think nowadays everybody, their parents, and their grandparents know how to WhatsApp, but that might be limited to the Netherlands?

I can’t speak for the rest of Europe but we used to have all kinds of deals to make sms cheap, you could send 1000 messages for 10 bucks. Slowly but surely the internet connectivity as we know it today came around, and while there were still limits on the amount of SMS you could send in the early days, I’m pretty sure we haven’t had those for a while! Maybe we’re just too used to WhatsApp now.