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.

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 which need 2 bytes to encode a character. 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