Short Message Service

Short Message Service (SMS) is a service made available on most digital mobile phones that permits the sending of short messages between mobile phones. SMS was originally designed as part of the GSM digital mobile phone standard, but is now available on a wide range of networks, including forthcoming 3G? networks.

The message payload is 140 bytes: either 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 2-byte characters in languages such as Chinese, Korean or Japanese when encoded to use 2 bytes to encode a character (see Unicode). This does not include routing and other metadata, which is additional to the payload size.

SMS is very popular in Europe and Australia, but is relatively less used in the United States.

See also:

• SMPP

External links:

• [SMS Forum]