For almost all English text, UTF-8 just turns out to be 7 bit ASCII. I don't think I saw a single non-ASCII character in today's telecom digest. But, if you want to use a non-ASCII character, you now have access to the full Unicode character set instead of the limited set included in ISO-8859-1. For English, though, I find ASCII to be fine. If you don't mind shouting, even 5 bit BAUDOT would be fine. Anyone up for EBCDIC?
Harold (former Teletype model 15 user)