SMS Message Quantity's

So you're sending the greatest well written SMS message of your life, however, you check your bill and you've been billed for many more messages that what you actually have sent!

SMS messaging standards have barely changed since the days of the good ol days. Messages are still sent in 140 byte chunks.

SMS encoding uses the GSM 03.38 character set which takes 7 bits to encode a character. Some quick math we get the following - 140 bytes x 8 bits in a byte divided 7 bits leaves us with the 160 character message limit.

However, your message contains less than 160 characters but you still get billed for multiple?

The main reason for this:

The main reason for this is your message has Emojis or non SMS characters. When you send messages with non-GSM characters such as Emojis, typographic quotation marks, Because of this, we have to use a different type of encoding known as UCS-2. UCS2 takes 16 bits to encode a character.

Besides emojis you should also be careful with accented characters. GSM 03.38 includes some accented characters such as ñ, à, and ö, but does not others such as á, í, or ú. You can find GSM characters here.

For further help, please reach out to our support team - [email protected]