Dot.life - where technology meets life, every Monday By Mark Ward BBC News Online technology correspondent

American Idol: Education in action

And yet American Idol is, through its sponsor AT&T Wireless, at the forefront of a drive to get Americans sending text messages.

During 2003 and 2004, part of the show has been given over to showing viewers how to vote with a text message.

It seems to be working. In February, for the first time, the number of text messages sent by cell phone users in the US exceeded those sent by British people.

British people currently send just over 2bn per month according to the Mobile Data Association.

Which just goes to show how mad the British are on texting given that there only 44m of us and 140m Americans with mobiles.

Across the pond

The love affair with text is about to get another boost as most of the problems with the sending them across the Atlantic have finally been ironed out.

Before now a text message to a US phone from the UK might well have sunk somewhere on the way.

A survey carried out by AT&T Wireless on trans-Atlantic text messaging revealed that few people thought there was a problem.

"66% of consumers thought that their text messages were getting through," says Glenice Maclellan, vice president of messaging services at AT&T Wireless, "and that's not been the case."

The text messages got lost because of a lack of co-ordination among the US networks.

Will text become a common language?

"There are about 150 carriers in the US," says Jonathan Linner, chief executive of wireless marketing firm Enpocket.

That's a formidable number to interconnect and many simply did not bother as they had relatively few subscribers.

And then there was the fact that many US networks use a different technology to that found in Europe and most of the rest of the world.

This basic US phone technology did not have text messaging built in at all. Then not all the operators added in text messaging in the same way.

"Different carriers have implemented text messaging in different ways," says Mr Linner, "some had 110 character messages, some 120 characters, some 140 and some 160."

A further layer of complication existed because some of the networks were themselves formed by mergers and combined phone systems.

Cingular, for instance, is the marriage of four separate operators and brings together three different mobile phone technologies.

According to Andrew Bud, executive chairman of messaging firm mBlox, this has led to some strange anomalies.

MBlox has been conducting tests of messages sent from the UK to phones on different US networks and has got some curious results.

Whether a message gets through depends on what phone the recipient is using, the operator they have signed up with and which part of that company's network they are currently using.

Message mountain

But the situation is improving.

US phone networks marry different technologies

AT&T, which is being bought by Cingular, has signed interconnection deals with 71 operators in 25 European nations to ensure that messages flow smoothly back and forth.

The other big US operator Verizon/Vodafone sorted out their trans-Atlantic texting late last year.

The US operators have created so-called intercarrier players to act as middlemen that funnel person-to-person text messages between operators and nations, says Mr Bud.

And he says operators are steadily encouraging people to swap their old phones, which could either not text at all or could only receive text messages, for ones that can both send and receive.

Text messaging only really takes off in any market when people can readily send to anywhere and be sure that it gets there - and may have a particular appeal to the US.