[lukeasch21]

Good point. I was looking into a way to maximize efficiency on Android without low-level access (no root necessary), so I'm pretty much limited to the charset that I can receive from the Android APIs for encoding binary data into (36864 chars). I was wondering if even the limited character set offered by an Android SMS receiver would still be magnitudes more efficient than the standard GSM-7 character set for encoding binary data, even though the amount of characters is less for each SMS. I'm having a hard time understanding if I'm oversimplifying things by just looking at the ratios 160/128 to 36864/70, in which case I would assume there would be huge benefits to encode data with UCS-2 instead? I haven't the slightest idea in how to accomplish that, maybe iconv would be useful as you mentioned? That is something interesting to consider though, dedicated hardware could easily take advantage of UCS-2 and encode binary PDUs to the point where you could achieve a somewhat respectable speed for TCP over SMS. Though by that point, I would assume SMS throttling would be a much larger concern so any benefits are mostly theoretical.