The default SMS character encoding supporting most Latin characters with a maximum of 160 characters per message.
Why GSM 7-bit Matters
GSM 7-bit is the most efficient SMS encoding available, packing the most characters into the fewest segments, but it only covers the GSM default alphabet: standard Latin characters and a limited set of symbols. The moment a message needs a character outside that set, an emoji, a regional script, even some punctuation like curly quotes, the whole message has to fall back to Unicode encoding at a lower per-segment limit.
How GSM 7-bit Works
GSM 7-bit packs each character into 7 bits instead of a full byte, fitting 160 characters into 140 bytes per segment. A message using only the GSM default alphabet is billed at the 160-character single-segment threshold; anything outside that alphabet forces the message into Unicode, dropping the limit to 70 characters per segment.
How SMPPCenter Uses This
SMPPCenter uses GSM 7-bit encoding by default whenever a message body only contains supported characters, keeping segment count, and therefore cost, as low as possible, and only falls back to Unicode when the content actually requires it.
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