Dina Oum had a “regular” telephone once — for about six months.

She never actually used it to make calls. She needed the telephone line to get Internet service for her computer at the time. So when she learned she could get on line through a cable modem instead, she ditched the “land line” telephone for good.

Oum, 26, who lives in Cranston and works for the University of Rhode Island, is among a small but growing number of people who’ve cut the cord on traditional house phones.

Many say they like the freedom and simplicity of having one phone they can use almost anywhere, at any time. And they like the increasing number of features offered on cell phones, from surfing the Internet to using them as portable GPS navigation units.

Oum isn’t smitten by the extra features. She pays about $86 a month for a fairly basic “plan” that allows her to make and receive as many calls as she needs, with free calls to and from her five best friends and unlimited text messaging. The plan also includes free “caller ID” — a feature that often costs extra on land lines — that lets her know who’s calling.

Best of all, Oum said, she has control over who has access to her phone number. There’s no “directory assistance” for cell phone users, so she only gets calls from people she knows . “I like not being found,” she said.

The cell phone costs more than a traditional house phone. But Oum said the convenience is worth the extra cost.

For many people these days, a cell phone is a given. One study says there currently are nearly enough cell phones in use for every American over age 9. So now the question becomes: Do I need to continue paying for a land line when I mostly use my cell?

That’s what Maria MacDonald of North Attleboro said her family were asking themselves. They paid as much as $800 one month between land lines and cell phones for her, her husband and three children — especially when one daughter, then in high school, had 4,000 text messages one month alone.They decided to cancel their traditional house phone in September 2006, and they now pay about $235 a month for five cell phones with 4,000 shared minutes and unlimited text messaging. “If you’re paying for a cell phone and a land line anyway, it does make financial sense” to eliminate one bill, Maria said.

It wouldn’t be the cell phone, she said. “My phone’s always with me. I don’t ever miss a call.”

Telephone companies are reluctant to talk numbers about customers who use land lines versus those who use cell phones, let alone the number of people who forgo one type of phone service for another.

One recent study said about 12 percent of residential customers have switched to wireless only. And of those, one third are college-age adults who may never have had a land line in the first place, according to the report issued by Economists Inc. in Washington, D.C.

The cell phone companies tout their convenience and optional services. The traditional telephone companies focus on the quality and consistency of their service — which isn’t reliant on “signal strength” from local cell-phone towers.

Kate MacKinnon, a spokeswoman for AT&T, which offers wireless service in Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts, and traditional telephone service in nearby Connecticut, said she believes “wireless and wired technology are complementary.”

Ultimately, she said, “our philosophy is to connect people wherever they are.”

MacKinnon said that many of AT&T’s younger customers tend to be more reliant on wireless phones because that’s what they’ve grown up with. Other people, she said, “will never give up their land lines and that’s okay — it’s really a matter of personal preference and comfort level.”

That’s why many companies, including AT&T, offer both wired and wireless services. “We’re in a position to be able to provide everything for everyone,” she said.

So: If you have a cell phone, why do you need a land line?

First, said Joan Lawlor, a senior product marketing manager for Cox Communications, land lines are reliable and secure, which is especially important in an emergency situation. Traditional phones also have much better sound quality than cell phones, without any worries about “signal strength.” And they don’t need to be charged like cell phones do, unless of course they’re cordless phones which also rely on rechargeable batteries. “Do you really want have to depend on something that you may have forgotten to charge the night before?” she asked.

Other benefits of land lines aren’t so obvious, she said. For example, a single land line will ring on multiple telephone jacks in the same house, so there’s a better chance of having a phone nearby when it rings as opposed to a cell phone that may be tucked away inside a pocket or a pocketbook in another room or maybe even turned off .

Another consideration, Lawlor said, is your living situation. If you live with your family or with others in the same household and don’t have a land line, then a person trying to contact someone at your house wouldn’t be able to dial one number to reach anyone or everyone who lived there. They’d have to know each person’s cell phone number in order to connect with someone there.

“It’s obviously more convenient to dial one number to talk to somebody,” she said. “That would also pertain to voice messaging. If nobody in the household is home, there’s a single spot to pick up messages. You’re not making multiple voice messages” on each person’s cell phone.

Land lines are required for certain services, including connecting with fax machines and connecting some security alarm systems with local police departments, Lawlor said.

Traditional telephone lines also tend to be much less expensive than cell phones, Lawlor noted.

Rhode Islanders can get unlimited calling throughout the state for as little as $11.95 a month. And even if they have to pay for a call, they pay only for calls they make — not the ones they receive. Cell phone owners use up some of their plan’s minutes for every call they make or receive, regardless of whether they wanted to take the call at all.

Cox also allows its land line users to forward calls to their wireless phones. “So when you leave your house, you can essentially take your home phone with you.”

Lawlor said her company has a new service, called “phone tools,” which enables customers to monitor their home phones and change their phone’s features from virtually any computer — so not only can they receive notification when they receive a voice mail at home, they can arrange to have their calls forwarded if they’ve forgotten to do so.

And, she said, they offer listings in telephone directories. “Some people obviously don’t want to be found,” she said. “But some of us do want to be found from time to time.”

Even though some people like their traditional home phone service, the fact is that cell phone usage increases each year, noted MacKinnon from AT&T.

CTIA-The Wireless Association estimates that there are 243 million cell phone subscribers in the United States,, according to one of the group’s reports from last year.

Cell phones are simply more convenient than land lines, MacKinnon said, and they offer so many more features and applications that aren’t available with traditional telephone service.

David Thompson, spokesman for Verizon Wireless, pointed out that people can use their cell phones to send text messages and even photos and video. So parents can take pictures of their kids at a soccer game and send them to their grandparents. Or, he said, if a person is out shopping for a new rug, for example, he or she can send a picture to their spouse and say, “What do you think of this?”

People can also use their cell phones to surf the Internet for news and entertainment, Thompson said. And they can download games or play games online, or download files for work.

Thompson said one of his favorite new features is the GPS “turn by turn” navigation system available on his cell phone. It’s handier than the GPS units available for most cars, he said, since it’s entirely portable.

These services don’t come cheap, he acknowledged. Cell phone prices vary widely, depending on how they’re used. Verizon offers unlimited calling for $99 a month, but that’s just for voice calls. Other services, from text messaging to the GPS service, are available for a wide range of frees. The GPS service, for example, is an extra $9.99 a month. It’s also available for $2.99 for a day, handy for people who are traveling and don’t need the service every day, he said.

On the flip side, he said, the cell phone can save people money because the plans include free long-distance service which often costs more with traditional phones. People can adjust their cell phone “plans,” and therefore their monthly payments, to reflect the services they need and want, he said.

All this doesn’t mean that cell phones are better than land lines, or vice versa, said MacKinnon of AT&T. They’re simply different. Some people will use land lines primarily and keep their cell phone in the glove box for emergencies. Others will primarily use their cell phones, but keep their land lines “as a comfort factor.”

But she said she’d never suggest a person pick one form of phone exclusively over another. “It’s like telling someone to like an orange more than an apple,” she said. They both have their place in the world, and people have their preferences.

Thompson said the majority of people today still have both a land line and a cell phone, but that could change –– especially given that younger people, especially those in college or recent college grads, have grown up using wireless phones as their only phones. They go off to college and don’t have to worry about splitting the phone bill, or worrying about toll calls, and when they graduate they simply take their phones with them.

MacDonald, of North Attleboro, said her family has used cell phones for eight years –– starting when her children, Erica, now 21, and twins Aimee and Drew, 19, were in middle school and needed phones to coordinate rides home from sports and activities.

Over time, they realized they didn’t even need a house phone, she said. “We communicate with the kids through their cell phones, typically, and we found that all of their friends called their cell phones, and all the people we wanted to talk to called ours, and it was primarily telemarketers calling the house.”

She also hated that she couldn’t easily turn off the phones in her house. “I despised the ringing. It was just an awful sound to me. . . . . It was one of those things: ‘Who’s calling and why are they calling?’ ”

The cell phone, she said, isn’t nearly as intrusive. And when she doesn’t want to be bothered, she simply ignores the call or turns the phone off.

Julie Regan, also of North Attleboro, recently pulled the plug on her home phone.

“It just seemed redundant,” said Regan, whose husband, Chris, has a cell phone through work. Her children, Colleen, 14, and Kevin, 11, have their own cell phones as well.

She said she “kind of” misses knowing where a phone is at all times, as she did with the home phone, and she sometimes forgets to charge her cell phone. But she loves the extra features her cell phone offers, from texting to taking pictures “and other kinds of snazzy stuff.”

She said she’s forced herself to be more conservative about her phone use, now that she’s paying by the minute. But that’s a good thing, she joked. “People like me who have the ability to gab and gab –– that tends to bother other people. So I’m actually doing a good service to the community, to the public,” she quipped.

Regan said she decided to cancel her home phone about six months ago, when she realized she was paying for a land line that “was used sparingly, if at all.”

She said her husband was nervous at first, because he uses his cell phone primarily for work and didn’t want to be besieged by personal calls.

But that hasn’t happened, Regan said.

They spend about $90 a month for their family plan, with strict limits on the number of minutes the kids can use. But that fee includes free text messaging, which is her preferred method of communication, anyway.

Regan said they probably save $20 or $30 a month by not having a home phone. But more important, she said, is that her house is a lot quieter without the phone ringing all the time.

That’s reason enough for folks like the MacDonalds to say goodbye to land lines forever.

Being wireless, MacDonald said, “is a beautiful thing.”What to consider before cutting your land line

•The sound quality is usually better on a traditional phone.

•A traditional phone (with a cord) is always charged.

•People trying to get in touch with you can look up a land line number in the phone directory.

•You may need a land line for a fax machine.

•Your house security system may require a land line to connect to the local police department.

lkirk@projo.com