smsanonyme

UCS-2

UCS-2 is the 16-bit encoding triggered as soon as an SMS contains a character foreign to GSM-7: the capacity then drops to 70 characters per message.

Back to the glossary

In brief

UCS-2 is the 16-bit encoding triggered as soon as an SMS contains a character foreign to GSM-7: the capacity then drops to 70 characters per message.

To go deeper

It only takes a message carrying one sign impossible to encode in GSM-7 — emoji, ideogram, Cyrillic or Arabic letter — for the whole SMS to switch to UCS-2, at 16 bits per character.

The effect is mechanical: the 140 bytes of payload now hold only 70 characters. A single emoji in a 100-character text message is thus enough to spread it over two SMS.

Send an anonymous SMSFAQBlog

Related concepts

Browse all concepts
01GSM-7 alphabetGSM-7 is the 7-bit character set used by default for SMS: it opens up 160 characters per message but omits some accented letters.02Concatenated SMSA concatenated SMS is a long message chopped into several SMS that the phone reassembles, each segment carrying only 153 characters in GSM-7.

// Anonymous SMS · Hidden number · To France

Envoyez votre message, gardez l'anonymat

Votre numéro reste masqué, aucune inscription, aucune trace. Rédigez, confirmez, et votre SMS part de façon totalement anonyme.

Envoyer un SMS anonyme