Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said at CTIA that in about two years, monthly cell phone bills will focus on how much data is used instead of how many voice minutes are used.Voice plans have gotten cheaper and at the same time there is a shift to smartphones with data plans.At some point voice becomes just another application over data.But until then we at ABI Researchthink this type of change will take much more than two years across the industry.More people have to move to smartphones, and voice needs to shift to VoIP.There is an increasing use of Skype, Line 2, and other VoIP services available to use on smartphones, but mobile operators also need to offer their own robust VoIP service as a replacement to cellular voice.Then mobile phone service plans will certainly move from voice minutes to buckets of data.Dan Hesse seems to be referring to metered plans, but beyond that, this could also mean shared buckets of data across multiple devices.
