Special characters can double price of SMS messages
Some phones send message in two or three parts
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Sending SMS text messages can prove unexpectedly costly for mobile telephone users. Pertti Lindeman, a Finn who lives in Spain, has discovered a fault - or more accurately, a characteristic - in his mobile telephone which causes a single message containing special characters to be sent as two, or sometimes even three - and to be billed accordingly.
At first, Lindeman suspected that his local service provider was mistakenly overcharging him. The truth emerged when the problem was repeated in messages sent from a certain model of mobile phone using the SIM card of an Estonian operator.
During a bout of the flu, Lindeman had the time to take a closer look at his phone bill. To his surprise, he noticed that using certain special characters can cause the message into two, or even three parts.
An SMS message sent abroad costs EUR 0.70 in Spain, but at times Lindeman has been billed EUR 2.10 for a single message of fewer than 160 characters.
In Finland, prices of both domestic and international SMS messages are significantly lower. Finnish operators charge an average six to ten cents for a message.
The problem rarely comes up in Finland anyway, as letters with accents or tildes, such as é or ñ, are rarely needed in Finnish-language messages.
On a global scale, text messages are big business for mobile operators. An estimated one trillion messages were sent last year - almost three billion a day.
The problem does not apply to nearly all models of mobile phone. Helsingin Sanomat tested messaging with several Nokia models and those of a few other manufacturers.
Of those tested, a single message came out as two in the cheaper 1100 and 2600 models. With SonyEricsson phones, the same happened with the fairly expensive K800i and W850 models. Pertti Lindeman first noticed the problem in Spain while using the latest Motorola Razr K1 model.
In Nokia models, the splitting of a message into two is indicated on the display already as the message is being written; the number in the upper right hand corner of the display, right after the slash sign (/) indicates how many parts the message is in (or more specifically, the location of the cursor in the message).
If there are more than 70 characters in a message and one of them is a rare special character, the SMS is sent as two messages.
In older Nokia models, and in newer, more expensive phones, special characters do not appear to increase the number of messages.
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 6.11.2006 - TODAY |
 Special characters can double price of SMS messages |
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