Why Text Messages Are Limited To 160 Characters

The LA Times has a story about Friedhelm Hillebrand, one of the communications researchers behind efforts to standardize various cell phone technologies. In particular, he worked out the 160 character limit for text messages. "Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters. That became Hillebrand's magic number ... Looking for a data pipeline that would fit these micro messages, Hillebrand came up with the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks. This smaller data lane had been used only to alert a cellphone about reception strength and to supply it with bits of information regarding incoming calls. ... 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.

Comments

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Speare]

I think the Japanese and Chinese markets have completely ignored the SMS thing because of the character sets involved. If 160 latin characters can be compressed into about 128 bytes, how many hanzi can fit? Maybe forty? That's probably enough for some thoughts like "Meet you at train station at 11am" but nothing really more complicated than that.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[FredFredrickson]

I laughed a little when I read your comment. Stupid USA, no internet on their cell phones! Get with the times.

It occured to me shortly after, that I don't have internet on my cell phone either. A sad truth.

Interestingly, quite a few companies all have a vested interest in keeping society from progress. I mean, just a few articles back, we had an example of the newspaper industry just not getting it. My gut feeling? Wouldn't it make sense, instead of a billion different newsbook-readers, each for it's own brand of newspaper, just let me get my news on the cell phone?

And suddenly I see the problem- we don't have internet on our phones because NOBODY wants us to have the access that snuck up on US companies.

Corporations wildly mis-underestimated how the internet would take off. Instead of investing in it then, or learning from their mistakes, they're not investing in it now. So we still have companies fighting the internet. Even the internet companies are fighting us having internet.

Too late though, cat's out of the bag, and once you've seen it, you can never go back. I will never settle for a dumbed-down version of the internet, and going back to buying CDs (I buy mp3s) and purchasing cable (I watch hulu, and rent netflix).

Once we ALL have email on our internet enabled phones, we won't be able to be charged for each txt message. The internet is a pipeline, we can use email, IM, twitter, or whatever we please to communicate. This will be the undoing of the txt addons in the same way internet TV has/will ruin subscription cable.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[nlawalker]

This may be my number one pet peeve when it comes to professional communication. I have tried a number of ways of getting multiple questions to register, but nothing seems to be perfectly effective. The best tactic I've managed to come up with is including only the following in the body of an email:

1. A preamble, no longer than two sentences, that says something along the lines of "[Person's name here], I need your response to the following questions by [date]:". Using their name is key, even if no one else is on the To: or CC: line.
2. A *numbered* list of questions (not bulleted), each ending in a question mark.

The other thing I've started doing is keeping a running list called "waiting on" that serves the sole purpose of listing the responses and tasks I'm waiting on from other people, no matter how small. As a consultant, I've found that "due diligence" means "one reminder email at least every other work day" when it comes to getting questions answered. Otherwise, getting chewed out for not adequately following up is a very real possibility. I've been asked for a paper trail before, and I always get a laugh of approval when I spool out the reams of email I've sent trying to get the simplest questions answered.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[IgnoramusMaximus]

(Of course, the above won't come through correctly on Slashdot, but they are about half the characters of the English phrases.)

I could never figure out why the main Slashdot site garbles all 2-byte character sets, since clearly the Slashcode itself can handle it.