On Monday, wireless number portability takes effect in the top 100 metropolitan areas in the United States. The rest of the country will follow six months from now.

Under the new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules, consumers in those top markets can change wireless phone carriers without having to abandon their cherished mobile phone numbers—assuming they have a choice of carriers which, according to some analysts, some 95% of wireless phone customers now do.

Why haven't you switched before? Maybe you have a particularly clever wireless phone number—HIT-MATT, or HI-IDIOT, or CALLTOY, or something—or maybe you simply don't want to disappear from the speed-dial lists of all your friends. Now you can be HI-IDIOT on some other wireless phone company's service plan.

Maybe you want a divorce from your current mobile phone company because of irreconcilable differences. Their service sucks, you can't get coverage in your office, customer service is indifferent or incompetent, their billing perpetually incomprehensible. Although many unfriendly wireless phone carriers will now be friendly—in the past, they could be snotty because they knew you weren't going anywhere—it's not so easy for incompetent companies to become competent overnight. Thanks to the passage of the Number Portability rules, you're free to take your business to someplace where it's appreciated.

But are your differences truly irreconcilable? If all you want is a cheaper plan, you may find that your current company is suddenly much more interested in finding you a more agreeable rate plan. It will be interesting to see if such consumer-friendly services as, say, rollover minutes (the ability to carry unused minutes into the next month's billing cycle) will be universally embraced.

Or maybe you just want to switch carriers in order to get the latest and greatest phone, one that is not among the phones officially blessed by your current wireless company. (That's just the opposite of my situation: I want to change carriers, but the carrier I admire most doesn't support the phone I want to get.)

But keep this in mind: You may have signed a contract with your current service provider that mandates expensive penalties for early termination. In some cases, it could cost you hundreds of dollars to switch carriers, which almost certainly would erase any savings you might get from moving to a less expensive plan elsewhere.

Before you leap, check out this excellent site www.cellupdate.com/, from Hampton & Associates. It is full of good advice for consumers on how to make the portage as painless as possible.

Another site to check out is www.EasyPorting.com, which is the cellular industry's version.

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An association that represents local phone companies petitioned the FCC to delay the ability of consumers to transfer their landline phone numbers to mobile phones. The United States Telecom Association argued that the new rule was "unfair."

The only unfair thing about number portability, as far as I'm concerned, is that it didn't happen sooner. The new rules give more power to the consumers, and that leads to greater competition, and that's bad only for companies and industries that have grown fat and complacent because of antiquated rules that limit consumer choice.

That said, I don't plan to transfer my landline number to my mobile phone because, being a curmudgeon by nature, I don't want the extra annoying calls following me around all the time. Besides, other family members might not want me to hijack all the calls.

But there are several cohorts of young people out there that have no use for a phone that's tethered to a wall. These generations—the teen-agers to thirty-somethings—are ditching landline phones all around the world and using mobile handsets as their anywhere, any time communications devices.

As my hero Andy Grove of Intel says, it's an inflection point for the phone industry. Phone companies must adapt or die. I'm not sure at which stage the phone companies are in the Kubler-Ross progression, but I suspect we're heading into the "bargaining" phase Real Soon Now. And, just to re-emphasize the point, that's good for consumers.

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The Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA) calls our attention to a new poll by Wireless Week magazine, which found that most of us (61.7%, to be exact) simply stash or trash an old mobile phone when we upgrade to a new one.

The CTIA suggests a win-win alternative: Donate the old phones to the Wireless Foundation's DONATE A PHONE program [www.wirelessfoundation.org/DonateAPhone/index.cfm]. Your old mobile will be refurbished and sold, with most of the proceeds donated to one of several organizations dedicated to helping victims of domestic violence. Some of the phones will be given to the victims themselves, enabling them to call for emergency assistance if needed. If the phones can't be refurbished, they will be destroyed in an environmentally friendly way.

So, fish that old phone out of the drawer and take it to one of the donation sites listed on the Wireless Foundation web page.