automatic sms decompression?

Question

okay, pretend you had some means of distributing sms text messages to multiple phones (go ahead, pick any, so many already exist), could you send compressed text messages that were capable of being decompressed by the phone? specifically, could you send more than 160 characters per text message that would NOT require additional software on the phone, and especially that would be accessible by most/every phone?

to specify even further, i am essentially wondering if it is possible (not specifics of how to exactly, just want to know if theoretically this would be currently possible at all, even if it did require some clever coding or something), to send more than 160 characters via sms to a phone and have it all in one message?

or, if not, how many characters can you send via mms?

or, could you create a program which can run on phones and automatically convert compressed text messages into however much text in one window?

Answer 1

The 160 character limit for SMS is part of the GSM specification for SMS and is therefore an absolute limit, short of SPKN LYK THS there is no way to compress its content.

There is no protocol specified upper limit to the size of an MMS message, it will be limited to whatever the network deems appropriate, and to a lesser degree what the receiving device can handle. In either case messages up to a few dozen KB are usually fine.

If you want to send over 160 characters you could use a WAP Push message which uses SMS as the bearer to push a link to a web hosted document in a text message. (Although this needs interaction from the recipient)