How many characters in an international text msg

[yjp77]

Does anyone know how many characters are allowed in one international text message??

I know 160 are allowed for domestic texts but I heard only 80 for international.  However, I can not find that information anywhere.  I sent a text message to Canada that consisted of 240 characters/spaces.  I was charged for 3 messages instead of 2.  Anyone else come across this?

[dmapr ACE - Champion]

To the best of my knowledge the character limit is the same, but it actually depends on encoding in use (and the last time I checked, AT&T was failing miserably on UTF-encoded messages). Also, when a text message exceeds the size limit for one message, each subsequent part has a lower limit than a single message due to special "glue" inserted into messages that allows the recipient to reconstruct it into a single message. IIRC for Latin-1 encoding it's something like 160 for a single message or 140 per part. The character limit is much lower for UTF-8 messages, with something around 70 characters for a single message. I imagine some other encodings could fall in between.

If everything in your message was in English, then it should've been using Latin-1 and anything up to 300 characters should've been processed as two messages, but not knowing the exact encoding it's hard to tell what happened.