MIT Technology Review - Do You Really Need a Voice Plan with That Fancy Smartphone?

With even Facebook adding free calling to its mobile app, voice plans are starting to seem outmoded, but an experiment shows it’s hard to let go.

Talking and texting may have been the first things we used mobile devices for, but they’re hardly the only ones anymore. And when it’s just as easy to place a video call via Skype, send an instant message through WhatsApp, tweet, or check in on Facebook, summoning a phone’s dialer tends to be an afterthought. So could we could be approaching a time when it makes little sense to even have a voice or text plan.

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As an Android device owner, I used two mobile apps to make outgoing calls to any landline or mobile device: Skype, which is owned by Microsoft, and Rebtel, from a Swedish company that claims to be the second-largest mobile voice-over-IP service, with 20 million users globally. With either app, people could see my regular phone number when I dialed, and I set up call forwarding so that I could use Skype to answer all incoming calls to my normal Verizon account.

Read the full review at MIT Technology Review.