[ryrub]

Any way around cingular's 160 char. sms limit through a 3rd party app or something? Thanks in advance

[t2gungho]

Any way around cingular's 160 char. sms limit through a 3rd party app or something? Thanks in advance

Sprint has the same thing

[Insertion]

Well, it is Short Messaging Service...

[dutchtrumpet]

Well, it is Short Messaging Service...

A delivery format I'm sure with whic I'm sure you and yours are well aquainted.

[BMIC50]

A delivery format I'm sure with whic I'm sure you and yours are well aquainted.

You changed your pic....cool! Thought I would never see a dog get a lil *****!

[millsda2]

Well it is a Treo...if you need more than that, there's a new protocol that allows nearly unlimited characters. It's called email.

[jetkins]

I use SMS as a paging service. As a sysadmin, I need to get alerts from our monitoring systems at all times, and I need to get them immediately, so I have our systems set to send me an email that gets translated into an SMS, and I have my SMS alert tone set loud and unmistakeable (I use the "Loud Aria" tone).

Why am I telling you this? Well, I have discovered that there are no less than three different email addresses that will turn an email into SMS message(s) for my Cingular phone:

• mynumber@mobile.mycingular.com
• mynumber@mobile.mycingular.net
• mynumber@cingularme.com

All three of these will accept messages longer than 160 chars, but while the first two will split long messages into several shorter ones, resulting in several incoming alerts for a single incident, the cingularme address will then recombine up to five of those "submessages" into one longer SMS of up to 700 characters (including from, to, and subject). The downside is that anything after 700 is lost - the message ends with "More?" but there doesn't appear to be any way to say "yes"!

So obviously Cingular's systems are capable of transmitting longer SMS messages. I can only suspect that they artificially limit the size to increase the message count and thus the revenue generated from clients without unlimited messaging.

[AlleyCat]

As far as GSM goes, the 160 character limit on SMS messages is NOT an operator implemented limit (i.e. it is not set at 160 characters to get more revenue).

Way back in the mists of time (about 1993), when the original SMS networks were being built, it was decided by the equipment manufacturers (siemens, ericsson, nokia) that it would be useful if there could be a private chat channel available on GSM that the technicians could use for simple text messaging that would be used when configuring the transmitter towers. They decided that 160 characters text was MORE THAN ENOUGH for these messages, and so the standard for SMS messaging was created, and implemented for the technicians to use.

It was an enterprising network operator that realised that there was money to be made by letting the subscribers have access to SMS. Unfortunately, the standard was already established and implemented (160 characters per message), and could not be changed.

So there you have it. SMS is 160 characters because it was NOT designed for the masses, but for the technicians.

[jetkins]

As far as GSM goes, the 160 character limit on SMS messages is NOT an operator implemented limit (i.e. it is not set at 160 characters to get more revenue).
[...]
So there you have it. SMS is 160 characters because it was NOT designed for the masses, but for the technicians.

So if SMS messages are limited to 160 chars by the GSM standard, how is it that I can receive a single SMS message of up to 700 chars per my previous post?

[jorang]

Couldn't you just apply the 1.23 firmware update for unlocked GSM, and get unlimited number of chars in SMS?
...or is this a network issue?

I'm using the Unlocked GSM in Norway - without limitations in number of chars....

[AlleyCat]

So if SMS messages are limited to 160 chars by the GSM standard, how is it that I can receive a single SMS message of up to 700 chars per my previous post?

Becaue you don't receive a single 700 character message, it is broken up by the SMS server into individual 160 character messages, there have been extensions to the spec to allow for multi-part messages, but the fact remains that a single message is actually limited to 160 characters.

If you send a long message (greater than 160 characters), it is very likely that your service provider will charge you for that message in terms of how many 160 character messages your long message was broken up into.

[Insertion]

A delivery format I'm sure with whic I'm sure you and yours are well aquainted.

Looks as though Gary is getting a short message as well.

[Bill Gamble]

On T-mobile's network, SMS longer than 160 charaacters are sent (complete, I believe) as MMS - and charged for as such.

[Vorozhbyt]

Hi,

it was discussed already some time ago, please look here:

http://discussion.treocentral.com/sh...&highlight=160

[DetroitWebOS]

Just send it to your mms acount/email. I think its yournumber@mms.mycingular.com. It's text limit is way up. Not sure what it is but much more than SMS and it gets "pushed" in realtime to your phone. Problem solved. Except usually you don't get as many mms messages on your plan.