why 160 chars in an SMS??

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kauzy

kauzy

Galvanizer
Today i was typing an SMS to ma GF :bleh:
it was really huge... like 500 chars or something... when i tried to send it... it asked me that it'll be sent in 5 parts... i said ok nd sent it... but ma GF got it as 5 different sms's ...n not as a single huge sms.... so the thing i wanted to convey cudn't be done... :cry:

neways... just wanted to ask... why 160 chars.... why not 1k or like that???:@ :@ :@

Kauzy...
 
Make more money :rofl:

On a serious note, I think it has to do something with what amount of data can be sent in the single timeslot/frame it is assigned to a GSM subscriber.
 
personally i hate typing any more than 4 words on a phone ...those small keys ..yikes , i hate dem mobiles
 
here is the long explanation:

The NowSMS Tech Support Files: Long SMS Text Messages and the 160 Character Limit

As for your GF receiving them as separate messages, most new phones support concatenated messages and send and display multiple contiguous messages as one

however, if the phone you are sending the SMS from does not know how to append the continuation headers, or the phone receiving the SMS does not know how to handle the header info, the message will be broken into multiple 160 char sms's

In other words, one of you has an old & outdated handset and needs an upgrade
 
Wiki said:
Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets:

the default GSM 7-bit alphabet (shown below), the 8-bit data alphabet, and the 16-bit UCS2 alphabet.[16] Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual Short Message sizes of 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters. Support of the GSM 7-bit alphabet is mandatory for GSM handsets and network elements[16], but characters in languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Slavic languages (e.g. Russian) must be encoded using the 16-bit UCS2 character encoding (see Unicode). Routing data and other metadata is additional to the payload size.

Larger content (known as "long SMS" or "concatenated SMS") can be sent segmented over multiple messages, in which case each message will start with a user data header (UDH) containing segmentation information. Since UDH is inside the payload, the number of characters per segment is lower: 153 for 7-bit encoding, 134 for 8-bit encoding and 67 for 16-bit encoding. The receiving handset is then responsible for reassembling the message and presenting it to the user as one long message. While the standard theoretically permits up to 255 segments, 6 to 8 segment messages are the practical maximum, and long messages are often billed as equivalent to multiple SMS messages.
Click to expand...

250pxgsm7bitalphabetde2.png

Wiki

SMS [160 Chars]

- Short message service - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

EMS [760 Chars]

- Enhanced Messaging Service - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

- What is Enhanced Messaging Service? - a definition from Whatis.com - see also: EMS

MMS

- Multimedia Messaging Service - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
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