Messages are sent via a store-and-forward mechanism to a Short Message Service Centre (SMSC), which will attempt to send the message to the recipient and possibly retry if the user is not reachable at a given moment. Both Mobile Terminated (MT), for messages sent to a mobile handset, and Mobile Originating (MO), for those that are sent from the mobile handset, operations are supported. Message delivery is best effort, so there are no guarantees that a message will actually be delivered to its recipient and delay or complete loss of a message is not uncommon, particularly when sending between networks. Users may choose to request delivery reports, which can provide positive confirmation that the message has reached the intended recipient, but notifications for failed deliveries are unreliable at best.

Transmission of the short messages between SMSC and phone is via SS7 within the standard GSM MAP framework. Messages are sent with the additional MAP operation forward_short_message, whose payload length is limited by the constraints of the signalling protocol to precisely 140 bytes. In practice, this translates to either 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 2-byte characters in languages such as Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Slavonic languages (e.g. Russian) when encoded using 2-byte UTF-16 character encoding (see Unicode). This does not include routing data and other metadata, which is additional to the payload size.

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