Why texts are limited to 160 characters

You have now entered the message concatenation zone! One you have entered this zone, ALL messages including the first one will be limited to characters. The remaining 7 characters are used by the carriers to write coding which places the messages in order when putting them back together. While you don't see this coding inside of the text itself, you will notice in the message breakdown below your content box on this page that the coding appears in blue.

It looks something like this: 0x05 0x00 0x03 0x0a 0x02 0x0. Unicode is another form of sending method. Therefore, Unicode SMS messages are limited to 70 characters, and messages longer than this will be segmented. Messages containing any characters such as emojis are split into 70 character chunks. Like GSM, Unicode also offers message concatenation. Unlike the GSM character deducation of 7 characters per, Unicode messages will only lose 3 characters when concatenating.

The messages will be concatenated into 67 characters using 3 characters from the beginning of each character chunk. Each extra emoji deducts characters depending on the emoji type. What counts as a long message or a multi-part message?

What about special characters, like Unicode and emojis? The length of a text message without any bells or whistles is characters, including spaces.

GSM includes Latin letters A to Z, numbers 0 to 9, and a few special characters such as exclamation marks. As soon as your text becomes a multi-part message, the character limit changes to characters per part.

More data is required to create a sequence of messages, so the count decreases from to Those seven characters get used for invisible headers and footers. You will get charged per part; in other words, one part is one SMS credit. Regardless of how many parts you send, your recipients will only receive one, albeit long, message. It is wise, however, to consider how engaging you are being. There is a delicate balance between being concise and informative. If a message contains any characters that are not standard GSM, its maximum character length will become 70 characters long.

Because Unicode is more complex than the traditional Latin alphabet, each character requires more data to be stored. Did you know: Unicode makes encoding characters excluded from the non-GSM alphabet possible across most technologies, including smartphones. Encoded characters are made up of technical symbols like mathematical signs, brackets, dashes, arrows, and non-Latin letters such as Chinese or Thai. SMS users who wish to communicate with other alphabets also are limited to fewer characters.

The character SMS limit has become widely known, and many different organizations are designing ways to communicate within this constraint. Several popular social media and microblogging sites are set up with text messages in mind. Some of the most common actually limit transmissions to characters, usually to make room for user names. Many news outlets and politicians also release short messages ready to be transmitted through these services.

Leo Zimmermann. Please enter the following code:. Messages not encoded with GSM-7 are limited to 70 characters. Twilio's platform supports long messages up to characters across all Programmable Messaging channels, including SMS. However, for SMS messaging, Twilio recommends sending messages that are no more than characters to ensure the best deliverability and user experience. See this article for details. When you send an SMS message containing more than characters, the message is split into smaller messages for transmission.

For example, a character message will be sent as two messages: one with characters and a second with eight characters. Messages containing any UCS-2 characters will be limited to 70 characters.