OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/21431/Why_Text_Messages_Are_Limited_to_160_Characters Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Sun, 29 Nov 2009 13:26:35 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com Comment by ephracis http://osnews.com/thread?361708 http://osnews.com/thread?361708 So it's because one guy hits an average on 160 chars when he types random sentences?

Nice. However, 160 is not MY average. That annoys me. Luckily my phone splits and merges text messages automagically so I don't have to get annoyed anymore. Mon, 04 May 2009 21:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ephracis) Comments RE: Comment by ephracis http://osnews.com/thread?361709 http://osnews.com/thread?361709 What annoys me about it is how they charge you for two messages when it's just one with this artificial limitation of 160 characters! Mon, 04 May 2009 21:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (daedliusswartz) Comments RE: Comment by ephracis http://osnews.com/thread?361710 http://osnews.com/thread?361710
So it's because one guy hits an average on 160 chars when he types random sentences?

Nice. However, 160 is not MY average. That annoys me. Luckily my phone splits and merges text messages automagically so I don't have to get annoyed anymore.


It would seem that way, but then it goes on to say...

Initially, Hillebrand's team could fit only 128 characters into that space, but that didn't seem like nearly enough. With a little tweaking and a decision to cut down the set of possible letters, numbers and symbols that the system could represent, they squeezed out room for another 32 characters.


So it looks like 160 happened to be all they could fit anyway. Mon, 04 May 2009 21:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (FunkyELF) Comments RE[2]: Comment by ephracis http://osnews.com/thread?361711 http://osnews.com/thread?361711 Argue whatever you want - it *is* still two messages being sent. Mon, 04 May 2009 21:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zegenie) Comments RE[3]: Comment by ephracis http://osnews.com/thread?361728 http://osnews.com/thread?361728 It's still a major robbery. With the price of broadband internet nowadays, charging what they charge for sending a mere 160 bytes (plus, I dunno, another 100 bytes of headers?) is completely ridiculous. Mon, 04 May 2009 23:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (wanderingk88) Comments RE[3]: Comment by ephracis http://osnews.com/thread?361734 http://osnews.com/thread?361734 No it's not. It's one message, just split into two.

I don't buy the line that's all they could allow technically. What is this.. Windows 1.0 days? Sheesh.

The mobile even says "updating message" when there's several SMS coming in as one message, so they know full well it's a single message but charge for multiples. Tue, 05 May 2009 00:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (daedliusswartz) Comments Because... http://osnews.com/thread?361742 http://osnews.com/thread?361742 ... if they allowed you to type much more characters, or if they charged for a sms what it costs them as compared with a minute of conversation, no-one would use anything but sms most of the time. Tue, 05 May 2009 01:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (wannabe geek) Comments Comment by kaiwai http://osnews.com/thread?361750 http://osnews.com/thread?361750 The funny part of this whole SMS situation is that sending an email from ones mobile phone is cheaper given the data rates Vodafone charges. $10 for 100MB for 3G mobile internet - imagine how many emails you could send for $10 versus the pricing plans that both big operates (Vodafone and Telecom NZ) charge. Tue, 05 May 2009 01:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (kaiwai) Comments It's two lines on a terminal http://osnews.com/thread?361777 http://osnews.com/thread?361777 I'm surprised no-one's mentioned the obvious (even in the original article) - 160 characters is 2 lines of a standard 80-character terminal (in the "olden" days, physical terminals like the VT100 would default to 80 characters, though they also had a 132-character mode).

It does seem an arbitrarily low limit to me (i.e. one not related to any technical reason) - whilst it's enough for a single sentence, it's not enough for a full paragraph. A better limit might have been 256 characters, which would both enough for a paragraph and also more "meaningful" in the computer world in the sense that it's a power of two. Tue, 05 May 2009 06:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rklrkl) Comments Service Charge http://osnews.com/thread?361806 http://osnews.com/thread?361806 Think of it this way. When you buy water on the streets, it comes in bottles right? And you buy in bottles, no matter how just one bottle will not satisfy you.

This is unlike the case for households, where you get all the infrastructure paid for, then you may pay-as-you-use. And usually cheaper per unit too.

Same thing with filesystem blocks. You pay for disc space no matter how much or how little you use for each block allocated.

Complaining about how the "160-character limit is atrocious" is pointless because the phone operators have to do work to provide you with this service, and they must be paid.

However, as kaiwai noticed, having emails cheaper than SMS is the thing we should complain about. i.e. We should be complaining about how these companies are ripping us off! Tue, 05 May 2009 09:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (xiaokj) Comments RE: Service Charge http://osnews.com/thread?361812 http://osnews.com/thread?361812 Now, 20 Min is really short...

But on my topic, do you complain that tcp packets are limited to, say, 1024 bytes? Tue, 05 May 2009 10:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (xiaokj) Comments RE[2]: Service Charge http://osnews.com/thread?361839 http://osnews.com/thread?361839
Now, 20 Min is really short...

But on my topic, do you complain that tcp packets are limited to, say, 1024 bytes?


Is my ISP charging me $0.10 per TCP Packet? Tue, 05 May 2009 12:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Feanor) Comments Think before you sent http://osnews.com/thread?361899 http://osnews.com/thread?361899 The few times I think about sending a text I try to get the info or question within 1 text. If that is not possible I just make a phone call which is cheaper and mostly easier in that case.
Only if a phone call is not possible I use sms messages and in that case I don't care about the number of texts, but that happens not very often. Most months I haven't even sent a single text (the structured ones I have to sent work excluded). Tue, 05 May 2009 16:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (spinnekopje) Comments Comment by elmimmo http://osnews.com/thread?361971 http://osnews.com/thread?361971 SMS have perverted syntax, grammar and spelling (in Spain, at least), initially because of the castrated input method, then because unlike Hillebrand, we are not alone in this world and sent messages are actually part of a dialog with other humans, so naturally 160 is NOT enough many times. At that point, predictive dictionaries just go against your wallet.

2 years ago I came to live to Japan, where they have been using regular e-mail on the mobile phone for a decade, with a limit of 10.000 characters per message (and Japanese characters, that is), and boy was it a breath of oxygen to my fingers.

Nobody here abbreviates anything, and predictive dictionaries seem to know just too much about what you are thinking (of course, it also counts that there is no alternative way to write Japanese without one, that there cannot be such a thing as "spelling mistakes" in the written language, and that their grammar is far more systematic than English, let alone latin languages).

And then Twitter came with the great idea of taking this insipid (and this time, unnecessary) frustration to the web. I am sure I am not the only one spending 90% of the time in a twit in editing so as to fit what does not fit. Which is why I stopped using it.

SMS are not cool and we should kill them. Wed, 06 May 2009 00:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (elmimmo) Comments Good business to be in http://osnews.com/thread?362056 http://osnews.com/thread?362056 So let's see. €0,19 for 160 bytes. That is like €1.245,18 / MB.

I knew I made a wrong career move somewhere. I'm off to start a phone company. Cheers. Wed, 06 May 2009 12:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (boblowski) Comments