[wharvle]

1) Kids? You mean only high schoolers, right? I lived that time period and can't imagine any kid who didn't drive having a cell phone, then.

2) I graduated in the early '00s and I think maybe 5% of the kids in my graduating class, at most, had a cell phone by graduation. Mostly some shitty Nokia with a phone-only or low-texting plan (texting was still crazy-expensive), mainly for contacting parents about after school activity stuff.

Middle-class-spectrum car-dependent exurb. Maybe it was different for, like, kids growing up in Brooklyn or something? Or rich kids, perhaps.

A more-common perk for children of free-spending parents, in my town, was still a second POTS line, though I do think that was starting to tip the other way just at the end.

[kalleboo]

Where I lived in Sweden, 1998-1999 was when the breakthrough started with prepaid SIM cards with subsidized phones. In my graduating middle school class there were maybe 3-4 kids with mobile phones (none of us were rich at all, just middle class, and all too young to drive), but in the following 3 years in highschool that went up to basically 100%.

The US was far behind on mobile phones for a long time.