By Patricia Wen, Globe Staff, 05/06/99

Analog cellular wireless phones are destined for the dumpster, on their way to extinction like the black-and-white TV, pushed aside by digital technology. It's a matter of just a few years.

So why do statistics show that analog service is still used by 75 percent of the nation's 60 million wireless cell phone users? Even though digital service edged out analog last year for the first time ever in the competition for new subscribers, it still means that nearly 12 million Americans who jumped into the wireless world last year chose analog.

Are they fools?

Not at all. Analog phones offer American consumers a low-cost way to try out wireless phone service without the big investment for a digital phone. Entry-level digital phones cost at least $100 or so, while the analog handset costs little or nothing.

Consumer advocates quibble with the words ''costs nothing'' or ''free'' to describe the giveaway of analog handsets; they say you ultimately pay for the phone through higher per-minute costs. Nonetheless, it's clear that you cough up less money overall in the first year by going with a basic analog plan rather than a digital one.

And if you're the kind of person who wants a wireless phone for convenience, and in case of emergencies, you'll appreciate that analog services still trump digital when it comes to blanket coverage across the country. Analog has just been around longer, and has more antenna sites up from coast-to-coast, especially in rural areas.

That said, digital phones have many major advantages, including better voice quality and protection from eavesdropping. And for people who use their wirelss phones a moderate amount, about 100 minutes or so each month, digital services - with their increasingly popular one-rate plans - start to become cheaper than analog, even if you factor in the cost of the phone. Digital one-rate plans can cost as little as a dime a minute.

Digital is simply a superior and more efficient technology. Analog has the drawback of having to transmit a person's entire voice over a radio channel. Even if there's silence on both ends of the phone, that radio channel is still tied up. There are a limited number of channels, and if you've ever tried to call your spouse as you're driving home in a blizzard and can't get through, it's because virtually everyone else on the road with you is also trying to call home on their analog phones.

And if the call is intercepted somehow, you better believe the stranger listening in can understand every word. Just ask former US House speaker, Newt Gingrich, whose cell phone conversation about his ethics problems was later broadcast to the world.

Digital technology, on the other hand, converts the phone conversation into a stream of binary 1's and 0's, which enables the calls to be greatly compressed and several calls to travel along the same radio channel. So per-minute charges are generally cheaper.

And because a caller's voice is turned into digital codes while traveling along the radio waves, it's impossible to eavesdrop on the conversation.

Reports of analog's imminent demise are not exaggerated. And wireless phone executives aren't looking back. Their heavily promoted cutting-edge products all depend on digital services, including smart-phone devices with Internet access, as well as novel ways of sending and receiving e-mail.

For business users, companies are also on the brink of rolling out ways in which you can use your wireless phone for high-speed data transmissions.

These executives are ecstatic about the idea that a digital phone could provide everyday access to the Internet or allow one to send lengthy memos.

They can just see the cell-phone meter running and the dimes dropping in.

Analog will probably just fade away through attrition, as digital plans start to be more competitive on price and carriers refuse to sign on new analog customers.

As of this summer, AT&T Wireless will no longer offer analog service to new subscribers in New York and some other cities where such service has been available, according to David Stanley-Brown, national director of advanced services for AT&T Wireless. (AT&T Wireless in Boston has always been digital.)

Some analysts say, however, that analog service, not the phones themselves, may have some staying power. They argue that carriers will be loathe to spend money to build extensive digital networks in small, rural areas where analog now operates. Digital phones, they say, will continue to have the option of roaming onto analog in areas where digital doesn't have service yet.

''Carriers can't get rid of analog now,'' says Kent Olson, director of the Strategis Group, a telecommunications consulting group in Washington. ''That's where the coverage is.''

It's unclear what the next generation of digital phones will look like. Carriers like to say future phones will be smaller and slimmer, yet they also talk about including bigger text screens for Internet display as well as keyboards for users to type messages. Just how will they fit a keyboard that doesn't require doll-like fingers? Technology specialists say they're working on it.

Richard Lynch, executive vice president and chief technology officer for Bell Atlantic Mobile, says digital phones in the next decade will have clever new options, such as the ability to convey their location to other phones. That could come in handy if you're stranded on an unknown highway and call 911.

Mark Lowenstein, senior vice president for the Yankee Group, a Boston-based telecommunications research firm, predicts that even some of today's digital phones may become obsolete in their own way, especially if you want the gee-whiz new services. In this fast-changing wirelss phone world, he says, the life cycle of a typical handset is about two years.

Who knows? Maybe today's digital handsets will turn into tomorrow's freebies.

Staff writer Patricia Wen covers consumer issues for the Globe. Her e-mail address is [email protected].