Concatenated Short Message Service

Why Trust Techopedia

What Does Concatenated Short Message Service Mean?

Concatenated short message service (concatenated SMS) is a series of multiple messages joined to form and communicate continuous SMS messages, providing convenience to modern mobile phone users.

Advertisements

One SMS message accommodates 160 characters, so early SMS-capable mobile phone users had to send successive individual messages to deliver longer messages. Concatenated SMS resolves this inconvenience.

Concatenated short message service is also known as PDU mode SMS.

Techopedia Explains Concatenated Short Message Service

A concatenated SMS accommodates up to 255 separate SMS messages. Concatenating (or joining) separate text messages is invisible to sending and receiving mobile users, who enter and/or read one long continuous message within a user interface.

Behind the scenes, eight-character SMS parts are used within the user data header information. As a result, only 152 characters of each SMS message part are accommodated. Because there are multiple SMS messages in a PDU mode SMS, service providers normally charge users for each SMS part within the entire concatenated SMS.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.