SMS Message Size & Encoding Type

iSMS charge 1 credit per SMS. Depends on the encoding type, the length of a SMS could be varies. Typically, we can group SMS in to 2 type which is:

1. English and Malay or any Latin, 159 characters are allowed in 1 SMS.
2. Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Cyrillic alphabet languages, 69 characters allowed.

There is a real-time calculator calculating the number of characters you when you compose SMS in iSMS, if you input more that 1 message, more than 1 credit will be deducted, so forth and so on.

Technical

Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets:

• Default GSM 7-bit alphabet
• 16-bit UTF-16 alphabet

Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual Short Message sizes of 160 7-bit characters or 70 16-bit characters (including spaces). Support of the GSM 7-bit alphabet is mandatory for GSM handsets and network elements, but characters in languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Cyrillic alphabet languages (e.g. Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, etc) must be encoded using the 16-bit UTF-16 character encoding.

Characters

• ONLY a-z, A-Z, 0-9, !@#$%&*()-_+=;:"'<>,.?/ characters are supported.
• Concatenated messages will be limited to 760 characters for ASCII or 310 for Unicode.
• Use semicolon <;> to separate phone numbers for mass sms.
• Delivery time may vary depending on gateway traffic.
• SMS credit will be charged regardless of delivery status and number of SMS.

MT Characters Limitation - Bulk SMS (MES)

Referring to the change initiated by MCMC Guidelines on price code formatting, effective by 09th MAR 2010, 09:00 (GMT+8), it is mandatory for all Bulk MT messages to have a price code at the beginning of the body message followed by a space “ <space> ” before the actual text message as shown on sample below. Please take note that the new price code format will auto append in our bulk sms system.

With the new price code format, your SMS body message will have lesser character space. Hence, please take note of the following new requirement when drafting your respective MTs:

RM0:00<space><text message>

Shortcode	Text message allowable per MT is 153 characters for Roman text and 63 characters for Unicode text.
Longcode	Text message allowable per MT is 159 characters for Roman text and 69 characters for Unicode text.

We seek your attention and immediate action to make the necessary adjustments on your existing MT messages to avoid disruption to your services. Please note that this new SMS characters requirement is applicable for all three Malaysia Telcos i.e. DiGi, Maxis, and Celcom.

Note: Please note that short code for DiGi do not support long message(concatenate message), it will split into a few message and send to receiver.