why sms is only 160 characters long?

"prince_nsa@yahoo.com" wrote:

> why sms is only 160 characters long?

Because an SMS can use either a 7-bit, 8-bit or 16-bit alphabet,
the number of bytes needs to be even and a factor of 7 (to
avoid wasted space).

To achieve the elegance of having a number that's a multiple of
10, the choices get further limited to 70, 140, 210, 280, etc
bytes. I can only assume the choice of 140 bytes (160 7-bit
characters) was made over 210 bytes (240 7-bit characters)
because it seemed to be the best compromise between usefulness
and available resources.

John

<prince_nsa@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1098783965.560915.96690@z14g2000cwz.googlegro ups.com...
> why sms is only 160 characters long?

Because that's the most they could get into a single GSM signaling "frame"
(I think that's the right term).

--
Donald Newcomb
DRNewcomb (at) attglobal (dot) net

On 26 Oct 2004, at 02:46:05 [GMT -0700] (19:46:05 Tuesday, 26 October 2004
where I live) "prince_nsa@yahoo.com" wrote:

> why sms is only 160 characters long?

Yes, but you can send 3 x 160 in one message (network dependant)

--
What goes around usually gets dizzy and falls over.