How SMS Works When Sending Text Messages To A Phone Using A Web Application

When you send a text/SMS message for your business, you are typically charged per segment. Knowing how many segments is important to understand the length and type of message you want to send to your clients. Read below to learn how the characters in your text/SMS message split into segments…OR…you can go to our SMS Segment Estimator tool further down this page to see how your message would be split.

A Little SMS History

What is the history behind SMS message length?

SMS is a standardized communication protocol that enables devices to exchange short text messages and was defined as part of the GSM protocol. Originally it was designed to “fit in between” existing signaling protocols which is why SMS length is limited to 160 seven-bit characters.

There are 2 types of SMS messages:

Standard message – contains characters from the GSM Basic Character Set.

Unicode message – If a message contains any characters that aren’t in the GSM basic character set, the message type will be treated as unicode.  (To read more about GSM & Unicode go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.38)

Can I Send Emojis?

Yes, you can, provided that the recipient network supports it. If the recipient network doesn’t support them, they will be stripped out. Emojis are counted as Unicode characters and will shorten your character length per message.

What About Long Messages?

A standard SMS message has a maximum of 160 characters. Longer messages are definitely possible, however please be aware that exceeding 160 characters will constitute a ‘second’ message. The end user will see this as 1 long message on their handset.

When a message is longer than 160 characters, this is referred to as a multi-part message as it contains multiple messages (or multiple-parts). The total SMS limit then becomes 153 characters per ‘part’ as the 7 characters are used up by invisible headers and footers which denote which part of the message is being sent (i.e. Part 1 of 2).

For example: If a message is longer than 6 message parts, it will be truncated (see below).

Standard English Characters:

1 – 160 characters = 1 Message

161 – 306 characters = 2 Messages

307 – 459 characters = 3 Messages

460 – 612 characters = 4 Messages

613 – 765 characters = 5 Messages

766 – 918 characters = 6 Messages

919 – 1071 characters = 7 Messages

1072 – 1224 characters = 8 Messages

Non-GSM (Unicode) characters:

1 – 70 characters = 1 Message

71 – 134 characters = 2 Messages

135 – 201 characters = 3 Messages

202 – 268 characters = 4 Messages

269 – 335 characters = 5 Messages

336 – 402 characters = 6 Messages

403 – 469 characters = 7 Messages

470 – 536 characters = 8 Messages

Estimate Your SMS Segments Using This Tool