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Sometimes when I send a single message to someone, i'm charged for two.

Concatenated messages are supported when sending to all major US/Canada carriers except for US Cellular, who do not support concatenated SMS. Many carriers worldwide as well as many smaller US/Canada carriers also support concatenated messages.

Generally speaking, you are charged a single message fee depending upon how many segments you send. A segment is generally 160 chars, though, some special circumstances do apply.

Historically, Sprint (US) did not support concatenated SMS. Concatenated SMS to Sprint is now supported as of March 2019. Older Sprint handsets may still be unable to display concatenated SMS, so these devices may still display long SMS as separate segments marked with "1/3", "2/3" etc.

When sending concatenated SMS, Wubur will auto-segment long messages with a special header, which mobile carriers can use to reassemble the segments on the destination handset. Thus, concatenated SMS can appear as one single message on the receiving device.

Please note, when sending very long SMS messages (longer than 10 segments with Unicode characters) some mobile carriers may have trouble handling these messages. It is advisable to keep your messages shorter than 10 segments if possible.

What happens when sending to a carrier that does not support concatenated messages?

Even if a mobile carrier does not support concatenated messages, you can still send long SMS to recipients on that carrier. Wubur will divide your long message into individual SMS to meet the character limit, and automatically add page information to the beginning of each one, for example (1/2), (2/2).

A note about US Cellular: 150-character limit

In addition to not supporting concatenated messages, US Cellular also limits the length of a single message to 150 characters in GSM encoding, instead of 160. This means that long messages to US Cellular may segment differently than those sent to other networks.

A single Unicode-encoded message to US Cellular can be up to 70 characters long, the same limit as other mobile carriers.

Receiving inbound concatenated SMS

Similarly, Wubur supports inbound concatenated messages up to 1,600 characters. Inbound messages over 160 characters long will be received on your Wubur phone number as one single message, as long as the sending carrier supports concatenation. The price of the inbound message will be the sum of the total number of segments.

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