Two things. First emergency services often do use SMS - as it's the last bit of signal to remain usable as they move into marginal areas. Data's first to go,

Two things. First emergency services often do use SMS - as it's the last bit of signal to remain usable as they move into marginal areas. Data's first to go, then voice, last texts. Second SMS never was 140 chars - it's 160 char GSM, or 80 Unicode, and every feature phone, from years before Twitter started, happily handled the GSM multipart SMS standard. I forget the limit, but it's at least 10 parts (I think it's much more - 64 or 128 maybe), so 512 char SMS is already done. In 1990-something.