How many characters in one chargeable text message?

John_Gray

This might seems like a very stupid question, but I have two mobiles, an old one on Fresh and the newer one on ASDA Mobile. When I begin a text message on the Fresh mobile, the character count starts at 160, whereas on the ASDA Mobile mobile it starts at 918.

Does this mean that I can compose a message nearly six times as long on the ASDA Mobile mobile as on the Fresh one, for a charge of one text message?

loofer

I believe 160 characters is the norm across all mobile network providers in the UK.

Your 2nd phone allows you the ability to compose the text message in 9k odd characters but you will be charged for every 160 charcaters or part thereof.

John_Gray

That seems quite reasonable, but can you provide a plausible explanation for the 918-character limit, instead of the 960 (6 x 160) that you might have expected?

[OK, I know the answer is '42', but we're in the wrong universe!]

reddwarf2002

The reason for the odd number of characters is because the phone needs to send special code to the network in order for the network to know that it is a long text message and that the receiving phone should treat it as a single text message rather than 6 or however many. So if you send one it will be 160 characters as no additional code is needed. If two is sent then it is less than 320 characters as concatenation code is required ( I can't remember exactly how many but I would guess it is 306 i.e. 7 for each).

For each successive text you need to deduct 7 as 'over-head'. 7 x 6texts = 42 characters over-head; 960 - 42 (over-head) = 918


Hope this solves the mystery ;-)