CHICAGO – The abandonment of analog TV for all-digital broadcasts that will come next year has gained much attention, while something similar happening now has kept a lower profile.

Cell phone carriers can now phase out their analog service, freeing up spectrum for digital communications. Unlike broadcast TV, where the vast majority of sets in use were built for analog service, embracing all-digital service isn’t a big deal for cell phones because nearly all wireless customers have had digital handsets for years.

An order adopted five years ago by the Federal Communications Commission allows carriers to phase out their analog service as of Monday. AT&T Mobile and Verizon Wireless are doing that. The other national carriers, Sprint/Nextel and T-Mobile, never offered analog service. Smaller carriers also might phase out analog, although they don’t have to.

A few folks who held onto their big, old analog phones for a decade or more will just have to get used to a new, sleeker digital model, but their numbers aren’t great. But for some niche applications, such as the wireless home-security business, the end of analog transmissions is a big event.

“We’ve been in a footrace to get our analog customers changed to digital,” said Joseph Beatty, chief of Chicago-based Telular Corp., a leading provider of wireless security-alarm technology.

Telular’s technology works mostly as a backup connection to wires between a security system on a customer’s premises and a call center that monitors the equipment. In some cases, wireless is the primary connection. Telular has about 384,000 units deployed nationwide, mostly at commercial premises and mostly digital.

But as of the first of this year, about 60,000 of those units still used analog carrier service, Beatty said. Telular works directly with security alarm companies that install its technology so that if anything happens to a wired connection, the system still functions.

“We’ve been telling these guys for more than a year they had to replace analog equipment with digital,” said Beatty. “I guess it’s just human nature to procrastinate. So we’ve really been scrambling to get all the units changed.”

Wireless security always has been Telular’s core business and remains so, accounting for 75 percent of revenue, but the company has long yearned to branch into other applications, such as voice. Efforts to persuade consumers to use Telular equipment to cut their lines to the phone company and effectively make all their home phones wireless have mostly fallen flat in the U.S.

There has been some success abroad, said Beatty, especially in Latin America, where the reach of wireless networks is much deeper than for wired networks. Telular provides boxes that connect to a wireless broadband network and enable a user to plug in phones, faxes and computers.

“About two-thirds of our boxes go to Latin America,” Beatty said.

Telular’s future lies in extending its wireless security franchise, he said. Of about 20 million monitored home-security systems in the country, only about 5 percent have wireless connectivity.

The switch to digital from analog has brought a cost reduction that Beatty expects will result in more homeowners opting for the extra security of a wireless connection.

“Adding wireless used to cost about $20 a month,” he said. “Now that’s down to $8 or $10.”