SMS segment — Short Message Service segment
Was ist SMS segment?
Dieser Eintrag liegt derzeit nur auf Englisch vor.
An SMS segment is the single-message unit SMS is priced and billed on. A message that stays within one segment's character limit bills as one segment; longer messages split into multiple segments, and each segment bills separately. The limit depends on encoding: GSM-7 fits 160 characters per segment, while Unicode (UCS-2) — triggered by a single emoji or non-Latin character — fits only 70 per segment.
More detail
Concatenated (multi-fragment) messages lose a few characters per part to the header the handset uses to reassemble them: GSM-7 drops from 160 to 153 characters per part and Unicode from 70 to 67. Orbit computes and reports the segment count on every outbound message, so the predicted cost is visible before the message sends.
MMS is the exception — it bills per message, not per segment, and has no GSM-7/Unicode split. The SMS segment applies only to plain-text SMS.
Häufige Fragen
- How many characters fit in one SMS segment?
- 160 characters if every character is GSM-7, or 70 if the message contains a single emoji or non-GSM-7 character, because the whole message gets re-encoded in Unicode. Longer messages split into linked segments — 153 or 67 characters per part respectively.
- Why does a single emoji change my billing?
- One non-GSM-7 character forces the whole message into Unicode encoding, which cuts the per-segment limit from 160 to 70 characters — so a short text can double its billed segment count.
See also
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