AN FRANCISCO, Sept. 1 — What if they had pounded the golden spike into the continental railroad and nobody noticed?

That is essentially what happened in the United States cellular telephone world last spring. Since April it has been possible for the customers of any of the major United States cellular carriers to send one another short text messages, but most customers still have no idea the service exists.

Advertisement

The service, known as S.M.S. (for short message service), is already wildly popular in Europe and Asia, but it has been delayed in the United States — partly because it had been impossible to send messages among carriers and partly because it has not been marketed well by the cellphone companies.

"It's partly a cultural issue, but the blame also falls on the U.S. cellular companies," said Alan Reiter, a telecommunications analyst in Chevy Chase, Md., who publishes the newsletter Wireless Internet & Mobile Computing.

Because interoperability has finally arrived, some analysts think that short message service is ready to take off in the United States. But critics argue that it is already being overtaken by less expensive and more powerful alternatives.

The text-messaging difference in the United States from the rest of the world could not be more striking. Last year, more than 19 billion communications by short message service were sent worldwide, according to the Global System for Mobile Communications Association, almost all outside the United States.

That is starting to change. Two gateway companies that handle message exchanges among carriers — InphoMatch of Chantilly, Va., and MobileSpring of New York (in partnership with VeriSign) — said their traffic volume doubled each quarter in the United States. The numbers are still tiny, though, compared with the rest of the world.

The failure of the cellphone companies to market short message service until now is puzzling, analysts said, because the service has been a huge financial success for European and Asian telecommunications companies.

But conditions elsewhere are different. Short message service is popular in other parts of the world partly because sending a text message has been less expensive than making a phone call and also because Europe and Asia have lagged behind the United States in e-mail and instant messaging.

In Europe, which has long had a single standardized cellular network and where text messaging is routine, short message service is responsible for 15 percent of all cellular revenue and, more significantly, 40 percent of the overall industry profit margins, according to Colin Matthews, president and chief executive of InphoMatch.

"This should be a no-brainer for the carriers," he said. "From a business perspective, all of the traffic and revenue is based on their existing infrastructure."

Indeed, the numbers are startling. Mr. Matthews estimated that short message service can deliver $750 to $1,000 per megabyte of data transmitted — a far higher return than any of the other digital services the cellular companies are beginning to offer in an effort to increase the profitability of their new wireless digital networks.

Still, there are numerous reasons why the United States has lagged behind other regions.

"Cellphone handsets are just not good for data," said Paul Mercer, the president of a Iventor, a small wireless start-up company in Palo Alto, Calif. "Moreover, S.M.S. isn't good for data either, because the business model is based on locking customers into an inferior proprietary data network."

Instead, he predicts that there will be a range of new data-centric handsets coming from Handspring, Microsoft, Palm, Research in Motion, Danger and others that will use standard Internet protocols and tiny full keyboards or handwriting recognition to make sending text easier.

For example, the Danger Hiptop communicator, which will be introduced by T-Mobile this fall, includes an AOL Instant Messaging application. That means it will be possible to send unlimited messages to other Instant Messaging users, all for the flat-rate price of the service.

Other analysts, like Donald Longueuil, a wireless researcher at In-stat/MDR, an electronics market research firm in Newton, Mass., think that because Instant Messaging services provide "presence," making it easy to tell if friends and business associates are available for messages, they will quickly begin to cannibalize the more rudimentary S.M.S. systems.

"I'm very pessimistic about the U.S.," Mr. Longueuil said.

Devices like the Danger Hiptop, which also includes a voice telephone, tend to be based on the Internet communications model, where all services flow over a single network and are priced at a flat rate.

In contrast, using short message service in the United States costs roughly 5 to 10 cents a message, and several of the carriers charge both the receiving and the sending parties. The price is lower in Asia, where a message generally costs 2 cents, and higher in Europe, where messages are about 11 cents.

Despite the pricing issue, backers of short message service are hopeful that the service will find a niche in the United States based on a series of new applications that will be introduced later this year. One popular use has been to permit TV viewers to vote in game shows, and a telecommunications executive said that the first trial of this in the United States would be later this year on the Fox Network show "American Idol."

The backers of short message service are also hoping that a service known as multimedia messaging, which is just now being rolled out by cellular companies in the United States and in Europe will catch on by allowing cellphone users to send small images.

Also next year, the short message service network will begin to be used for financial transactions, like purchases from point-of-sale terminals and vending machines.

Advocates of S.M.S. express belief that such services will be eagerly adopted by cellphone users. But critics deride the services as "kludges," a computer hacker's term for poorly designed systems.

"You have to dial a phone number to pay for something," Mr. Mercer of Iventor said. "It's just a stupid way of offering the service, and it's not what the Internet's about."