Washington ? Two years ago, Brittney Brooks, 17, never would have considered carrying a prepaid cellular phone, which shouted its cheapo status through bulky, unattractive handsets.

“I thought of prepaid as a bad thing,” the Washington high school student said. “There weren’t any good prepaid phones.”

Now, Brooks proudly carries around a small Kyocera K9 phone from Virgin Mobile USA, a prepaid phone service. It helps her control the cost, she said, and the K9 is a silver, ergonomic little number that comes with text messaging and an array of accessories.

She estimates 60 percent of her friends use prepaid service, even her mother.

“I wanted it because of good prices,” Brooks said. “Mom didn’t want a contract.”

And just like that, prepaid or pay-as-you-go phone service is becoming the next big wireless thing. Customers buy a phone, refill their accounts by paying online or buying a card with a code on it, then draw down from their balance with every call they make or text message they send.

At roughly 20 cents a minute, the average prepaid phone user spends about $30 a month, rather than the $55 a month paid by a customer with a contract.

That kind of service accounts for roughly 10 percent of the 182 million U.S. cell phone subscribers, many of whom are young like Brooks; others have bad credit. But the rate of prepaid usage is far less than the 95 percent of wireless users in Italy, or 50 to 55 percent in Germany and the United Kingdom, according to Ovum, an industry research group.

Prepaid already has become the standard in developing countries, because the plan doesn’t require sophisticated financial or billing systems.

Historically, prepaid services haven’t been as popular in the United States because carriers preferred to target the bigger fish – professionals and families with good credit who were willing to sign long-term contracts.

But now that market is nearly saturated, sending wireless companies looking for new customers. And exclusively prepaid services like Boost Mobile LLC and Virgin Mobile USA are posting the industry’s biggest growth.

The appeal of prepaid is that it requires no long-term contract.

Nextel Communications Inc., which owns 3-year-old Boost, generated 40 percent of its new subscribers from that service last quarter; Virgin Mobile, which is half owned by Overland Park-based Sprint Corp., was founded in late 2001 and accounts for about 60 percent of Sprint’s new subscriber additions.