National character sets
When letters from the “GSM Alphabet” are used in an SMS it can contain up to 160 characters. If other letters are used the Unicode format will be applied. However SMS in the Unicode format can only contain up to 70 characters.
For SMS operators this is important for the costs for sending SMS.
Now the Netfors SMS Center supports national character sets without using Unicode (Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, and a number of Indian languages).
That is SMS in all languages can contain up to 154 characters including control codes.