Why Text Messages Are Limited To 160 Characters 504
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.
SMS vs email (Score:5, Interesting)
An exercise in cartel economics: compare the costs of SMS traffic vs. email traffic and explain the differences. :-)
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:3, Interesting)
Thats because the majority of Internet Providers restrict their users from sending email from relaying off network to their network. These same providers refuse to enable authenticated SMTP to fix the problem of open relays.
Luckily my cell phone provider, Rogers, in Canada has a mobile SMTP server accessable from the cellular network only specifically for the purpose of relaying SMTP from mail accounts configured on smart phones.
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:SMS vs email (Score:2, Interesting)
Easy, SMS uses up signalling bandwidth on the cell tower, which is a relatively scarce resource, and when the signalling bandwidth is congested, no calls can take place, thus the company looses money/customers.
text messages longer than160 characters (Score:4, Interesting)
Why were CD's 650MB/72 Minutes? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because that was the amount of space required to fit Beethoven's 9th Symphony on one side of a disc. And the researcher apparently loved that Symphony and hated having to switch to different sides of a tape or record.
It's always interesting to the reasons why. Sometimes there is a purely logical reason, and other times, it's just because.
Re:Maybe the UK can tax these (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:5, Interesting)
128, at least, assuming UTF8. And the Japanese can say things a lot more compactly than we can:
èããY - I woke up.
åå¾OEãé£Yãã¾ã--ãY - I ate in the afternoon.
éf½éYã®åé"ãé話ã'ã--ã¾ã(TM) - I am talking on the telephone with my friend in Tokyo.
(Of course, the above won't come through correctly on Slashdot, but they are about half the characters of the English phrases.)
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:5, Interesting)
I could never figure out why the main Slashdot site garbles all 2-byte character sets, since clearly the Slashcode itself can [slashdot.jp] handle it.
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is reminding me of Shannon Entropy [wikipedia.org]. I'm guessing human thought contains a similar amount of bits whether it's expressed in Chinese (high bits/character) or French (low bits per character).
Re:BINGO! (Score:1, Interesting)
And a full-screen terminal (3270, etc.) is really just 25 punch cards.
I don't see how you got that.
A 3270 was a 24x80 screen (so, 24 punch cards) that talked SNA to the mainframe (add in SNA overhead). Each display character took two octets (double your data count to a minimum of 48 punch cards worth): an attribute byte, and a data byte.
In sending data to the mainframe, the 3270 would only send data that had changed from the previous mainframe-to-3270 write; it sent a delta of the data, not the entire screen contents (so reduce the count drastically).
In other words, a 3270 was not "really just 25 punch cards".
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you tried picking up the phone. You can always send your e-mail (but with the answers) as a paper trail of your conversation.
It provides two benefits:
1) Developing relationships. It's amazing how far a few seconds of idle chat can go to put a human side to your interactions with the people you need things from. This is really important with gatekeepers.
2) Forces you to be concise: If you have 30 seconds to ask for something - you'll be forced to get to the point more quickly.
If you don't get them, don't leave a vm. Just send your e-mail and call them later.
Re:Why text messages instead of email? (Score:1, Interesting)
I could never figure out why the main Slashdot site garbles all 2-byte character sets, since clearly the Slashcode itself can [slashdot.jp] handle it.
The dot-org site is run under an encoding of ISO-8859-1, while the dot-jp site tells browsers that it's UTF-8.
So when the high-bit bytes come in, they're treated "properly" on one site but not the other.
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, SMS is like a "stowaway" of a signal your cell must receive from time to time.
So the "real" cost of a SMS is 0.000000.
This is a broadly known fact.
Just like the "real" cost of a phone call is also practically zero for the operator, as the extra electricity used for one call is basically nothing. So every call charged by minute is pure profit for the operator.
Which is (partly) why there are packages with a lot of free minutes and messages. At least in Finland, for around 50 eur / month you can even have unlimited audio and video calls, unlimited SMS and MMS messages and unlimited 3G data.
Re:Step-parent of the year. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, excusing bad behavior as "honesty" is something I'm rather tired of.
Which makes her less stupid how?
I have friends that're dumb, and are the first to tell you "Ah ain't up on all that-thar book-larnin'..." I don't think any less of them for it, and they're some solid friends. Y'know, the kind you could trust at your back when the going gets nasty. Another fave anecdotal moment:
My dad retired to a rural area. A young couple {friends of the family} was getting married, and dad decided to give 'em a book on managing your budget. However, the young wife, barely 18, refused the gift. Dad asked why, and she explained that her husband, Reed wouldn't use it. Her exact words:
"Y'see, Reed don't read."
-blink-
Note, that wasn't "Reed can't read", or "Reed doesn't read much"... Now, you can call me ill-mannered for saying that Reed is probably not the brightest bulb in the marquee, but I'm telling you, some people are just plain dumb, whether it's politically correct to say so or not. That's the problem with the whole PC movement; you can polish a turd all you want, but it's still a turd. BTW, I'm not moderately hearing-impaired, I'm mostly deaf... and have no problems saying so.
Re:I'll Be Damned (Score:3, Interesting)
I've written application software for telco/carrier back ends, that's been deployed at carriers on every continent.
My layer sat on top of the infrastructure layer for SMS, but here's my best recollection from the internal training I got years ago.
Just like the article said, SMS was carried over the control path for call setup/takedown.
That path had very low bandwidth compared to the data (voice data, not IP data) path for calls. It was a control path and didn't need much. It was a limited resource with dedicated protocols and channels. Particularly in the early days of SMS, voice data was THE source of revenue for cell phones.
So using up the bandwidth in the control channel meant not being able to connect calls. There was a shortage of a precious resource whose over-use could strangle the primary flow of revenue to the carrier. So while the message itself was not expensive per se, it definitely was not without cost to the carrier. Carriers wanted to start exploring non-voice data services, and this gave them a way to get started without changing their existing network protocols and data flow, but they definitely had to be careful about how it was deployed and priced.
Of course telco pricing for ANYTHING is such a complicated market-driven competitive mess that there is an entire sub-industry of companies who keep track of all the special offers, plans, promotions, and whatnot that a given company has issued, knows which of its customers are in which plan, analyzes all the customer activity, and figures out who should be billed for what and how much. You're crazy if you think you can work out a "fair" price for a single element of telco service based on a guess of what it costs the telco to provide it.
At any rate, over time the carriers built up infrastructure around SMS, added IP gateways for the data that went over those dedicated control channels, added to their control channel capacity, etc., etc. Plus, in the US at least, SMS became and remained one of the most popular and steady data services among mobile users. All the major carriers in the US face significant business problems right now, and if they've got a small bright spot with predictable revenue at decent margins for a service folks like to use -- well, you can bet they're happy to have it and will charge what the market will bear (one way or another, in one plan or another, etc., etc.).