Date Effective: 1/2/2023
Supported SMS Message & Language Characters and Encoding
Supported Characters
The type of characters used in a SMS Message will determine the type of encoding which needs to be used in the SMS message. The Connections Communication Gateway (CCG) Messaging API automatically detects the encoding required for the characters used, which then allows us to support the delivery of SMS in most languages. We have full support for Unicode which allows us to support a wide range of languages including Spanish, French, Chinese etc. over SMS. All you must do is make sure you compose and send in UTF-8 format and our systems takes care of the rest.
Basic Character Set
The following characters will be sent as plain text 7-bit encoding, which allows us to send up to 160 characters per SMS message. See here more info on basic character sets
Extended Character Set
The following characters are also available, but they take up two characters in the SMS message rather than one
| , ^ , € , { , } , [ , ] , ~ , \
Other Characters
If other characters are required for different languages, Unicode encoding will be used. This allows up to 70 characters per SMS message.
Long /Concatenated Messages
The message body can contain up to 1500 characters. Depending on the characters used in the message, this will equate to the following numbers of SMS messages. The CGT Messaging service will support up to 10 SMS concatenated messages or fragments. It is very important to note that each Fragment is billed at the agreed upon message rate.
Using 7-bit Characters:
Each concatenated message or fragment with a 7-bit encoding has a maximum of 152 characters
Unicode Characters:
Any non-GSM-7 character will dynamically change your message to UCS-2 which limits your number of characters in your each of the message body to 70. If more than 70, you message will be concatenated message or broken into fragments with a Unicode encoding of a maximum of 67 characters including the User Data Header added to the message.
