Understanding SMS Message Parts

SMS technology has been designed for short text messaging, so the initial length limitation was 140 bytes which translates into 160 English letters and numbers or 70 Arabic letters. A way of sending longer messages has been introduced few years later to support longer messages. Today SMS messages are still sent in 140 byte chunks known as message segments or message parts.

When Unifonic communicates with carriers to send out SMS messages, we send them one message part at a time. To help you understand how many parts your message is going to consume we have a hint in the Campaign section of the Unifonic Console.

This is an indication of how many parts the message will take (2 – in the example above). Maximum number of message parts that could be sent to Unifonic in a single campaign or a message submitted over API is 10.

If you are using Unifonic SMS API and want to get a sense of how many parts your message will be split into, you can use open source SMS Segment Calculator.