Every letter, space, punctuation mark, and even special characters like emojis, which can sometimes occupy more space, are considered as characters.
We support 3 types of encoding:
GSM 03.38 — 160 characters / 153 characters when message consists of two and more parts;
LATIN1 — 140 characters / 134 characters when message consists of two and more parts;
UCS2 (UTF16-BE) — 70 characters / 67 characters when message consists of two and more parts.
Can you send more characters than the limit?
Longer messages may be sent, but technically require a continuation prefix and a sequence number on subsequent SMS messages. So one long SMS consists of two and more parts separate SMSs. Subscriber phone presents it as one message but technically they were delivered separately and were united. We don't recommend send more then 10 parts message (for GSM 03.38 it is 153*10 = 1530 characters).