HEN my wife and I moved recently from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to a larger apartment in Harlem, it was a short hop on the map. Technologically, however, it was a journey to the heart of the current turmoil in the telecommunications industry.

Of all the troubles associated with a move, we expected phone service to be the least of them: a routine order for a telephone line and two jacks. But when I called Verizon Communications, our local phone company, I was told that it would take a week and a half to fulfill the request, at a cost of $250.

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Other companies now offer local phone service, but they would need to have authorization from Verizon to make a connection to our apartment. So faced with unanticipated cost and delay, we took a step that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago: we decided to abandon conventional phone service altogether — and we are not alone.

In what may be the start of an alarming trend for the nation's largest telephone companies, the total number of business and residential telephone lines declined last year for the first time since the Depression — to 192.3 million at year's end from 192.6 million a year earlier, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

Those who follow the industry attribute the land-line decline in small part to the general economic doldrums, while some consumers have dropped second lines as they switched to cable modem or D.S.L. for Internet access. But tellingly, a small but growing number of consumers, many of them students or recent college graduates, have abandoned land-line telephones altogether in favor of wireless service. Nearly 3 percent of telephone users have made wireless phones their primary telephone, according to the Yankee Group, a telecommunications consulting company in Boston. So far the shift is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but that is likely to change, said Keith Mallinson, an analyst at the Yankee Group.

"It is more like gradual displacement than a complete eclipse," Mr. Mallinson said. "But the disruptive effect of substituting land lines is likely to become more far-reaching during the next few years."

Joel Kamm, a graphic designer in Waltham, Mass., uses a cable modem for his Internet connection and depends on a cellphone for the rest of his communication.

"I moved around so much in recent years, so getting a new phone line installed in each place was a hassle," said Mr. Kamm, 28, who gave up his conventional phone line two years ago. "This is the right solution for anyone that moves frequently."

One cellular company, Leap Wireless of San Diego, is at the forefront of this trend. Its Cricket service allows unlimited incoming and outgoing local wireless calls. Leap said last month that its customer research showed that a quarter of the 1.4 million Cricket subscribers did not have traditional phone lines at home.

Jennifer LeHockey, a 24-year-old Cricket customer in Westminster, Colo., said she had canceled her land line the day she got wireless service, cutting her monthly phone bills from about $90 to less than $50.

"I was just sick and tired of forking over so much money every month to Qwest," said Ms. LeHockey, a hair stylist. "As a single person, just having a cellphone was right for me."

Eric Rabe, a Verizon spokesman, said the decline in the number of land lines was no surprise. "The old telephone company measure of access lines is less accurate today as a measure of a company's health," Mr. Rabe said. Large local phone companies like Verizon are seeking to compensate for the decline in conventional phone lines by investing in the wireless and Internet access businesses, he said.

Still, the decline may be evidence of a fundamental change in the telecommunications landscape.

"It's a behavioral shift from the last hundred years in which we called a geographical place and got a person," said Jeff Kagan, an independent telecommunications analyst in Atlanta. "We're now moving to a model of calling a person — regardless of geography. The consequences of such a change could be profound."

In my own case, there was confusion over the location of our apartment (vacant for several years before it was renovated, it had disappeared from Verizon's records) and a misunderstanding about how long it would take the company's technicians to install the line and jacks that my wife and I urgently needed, since we both work from home some of the time.

Both issues were later cleared up (a Verizon spokesman said the company would have listed our apartment in its computer system if we had ordered service; he also said the installation would most likely have taken three days, the average in Manhattan). But my wife and I could not afford to wait before settling our telephone service arrangements.

We decided to use our two wireless phones from Sprint for local and domestic long-distance calling. Time Warner Cable installed a high-speed Internet connection in two days. We make international calls using an Internet service, Net2Phone, whose rates are cheaper than what Verizon charged in our previous service plan. All told, we figure we're saving about $50 a month by not having a local telephone line, on top of the installation charge.

Relying on cellphones for voice communications has quirks both good and bad. My wife has her voice mail available on her cellphone instead of an answering machine or a voice mail system tethered to a land line at home. She no longer goes straight for the answering machine upon arriving home.

The divisions between home and work and nearly everywhere else we take our mobile phones are also blurred. Family or friends may now reach us in a supermarket or on the street, instead of in our apartment, which is quieter, and sometimes the background noise confuses the caller.

Cellphones, as nearly everyone who has one knows, are far from perfect in terms of service. Calls are impossible to make from areas known as dead zones, whereas service on a traditional line is almost always infallible.

There are other drawbacks. Wireless calls tend to drop more often than calls on land lines, as Tracie Jacobs, a customer service representative in Orlando, Fla., who gave up her land line two years ago, has experienced.

"Cellphones are not perfect, but it's worth the $90 we save each month," said Ms. Jacobs, 33. She and her husband had two traditional phone lines, one for a dial-up Internet connection, before disconnecting both to go with two cellphones and a cable modem connection.

For those whose wireless providers do not offer unlimited local calls, there is a risk that cellphone bills will be higher than those for conventional telephone service.

"Widespread unmetered local calling would really be the catalyst for wireless substitution to take off," said Paul Melton, an analyst at Telegeography in Washington.

For the time being, however, these imperfections are part of the give-and-take involved in severing dependence on a traditional phone line. Our apartment, minus two telephone jacks and land-line phone, is testimony to that.