A message with only GSM7 characters can support up to 160 characters
If your message contains any characters not listed in the GSM7, the message is encoded automatically in UCS-2. In this case, each message takes up a lot more space, thus the message length is reduced to 70 characters.
When the message length exceeds 160 characters in case of GSM7 encoding (or 70 characters for UCS-2 encoding), the message is split up into to multiple SMS.
Please note that using the | ^ € { } [ ] ~ \ characters in GSM7, will consume 2 two characters each from your message
When the message length exceeds 160 characters in case of GSM7 encoding (or 70 characters for UCS-2 encoding), the message is split up to multiple separate SMS and sent to the phone separately as well.
In the above case, the GSM7 message is shortened to 153 characters and the UCS-2 message is shortened to 67 characters.
Encoding | Regular SMS | Multipart SMS |
GSM7 | 160 chars | 153 chars |
UCS-2 | 70 chars | 67 chars |