Apifonica SMS integration
with Altegio

You can request registration of a branded alphanumeric sender ID in your Apifonica Personal account under the Numbers and Sender IDs section. Fill out the form and our team will manually process your request.

Some countries may require pre-registration and whitelisting of alphanumeric sender IDs. Additionally, certain countries may have rental fees or monthly charges. We will provide you with all the necessary information and guide you through the process.

Yes, the Altegio integration app supports both notifications and marketing (SMS mailout) messages. You can find more information about customising notifications and marketing messages in the Altegio support documentation.

In your Altegio account, go to Integrations > Notifications and select the "Apifonica SMS" application or follow this link.

On the page that opens, click the "Connect" button to establish the connection.

The maximum character count for a standard GSM SMS segment is 160 characters. This includes all Latin characters (A-Z), digits (0-9), and some special characters. Spaces between words are also counted as characters. If a message exceeds 160 characters, it is considered a long message and may require multiple segments to be sent. This is a concatenated message.

When segments are stitched together, seven characters are sacrificed per segment to help with concatenation. Therefore, the maximum character count for long messages are:

2 message segments: 153+153=306 standard GSM characters
3 message segments: 153+153+153=459 standard GSM characters
etc...

For example, a message with 320 characters will be split into 3 segments.

It's important to note that certain symbols or characters outside of the standard GSM character set, such as € or {, are considered non-GSM symbols. While they can be used in SMS messages, they consume additional space. Each non-GSM symbol occupies two character spaces instead of one, reducing the available character count per segment. This means that the effective character count for a segment can decrease if non-GSM symbols are included in the message.

Introducing a single Unicode character in an SMS message changes the character encoding to Unicode (UCS-2) and reduces the segment character limit from 160 to 70 characters for a single message. When messages with Unicode characters are stitched together, three characters are sacrificed per segment.

Therefore:
2 message segments with Unicode: 67+67=134 characters
3 message segments with Unicode: 67+67+67=201 characters
etc.

Yes, Emojis can be used in SMS messages. However, it's important to note that Emojis are treated as Unicode characters. Their usage in an SMS message affects the message length, with older 16-bit Emojis counting as a single character and newer 32-bit Emojis counting as two characters.

Personalization in SMS messages can impact the cost based on the length of the personalized data fields and the number of messages sent. For example, let's consider a scenario where a 152-character SMS message includes personalization using a data field for the contact's first name, represented as %Name%. If the address book contains two contacts, Agata and Agnieszka, with different name lengths, the character count, message count, and billing cost would be affected as follows:

SMS to Agata:
Message length: 157 characters
Maximum characters per segment: 160 characters
Total messages sent: 1

SMS to Agnieszka:
Message length: 161 characters
Maximum characters per message: 160 characters
Total messages sent: 2

As seen in the example, when personalization data fields are used, the length of the message can vary depending on the length of the data fields for each recipient. If the character count of the personalized message exceeds the maximum of 160 characters, the message is sent and charged as multiple segments.
Each segment is billed individually, even though they appear as a combined message on the recipient's phone.
It's important to note that personalization can involve non-GSM symbols as well, which may reduce segment length to 70 symbols and affect the overall message length and cost.

Write us email to support@apifonica.com