A big thing I heard yesterday is that Wal-Mart is going to be offering a $45 unlimited nationwide cell plan, including unlimited data and text.  Yes, you read that right, Wal-Mart and $45 unlimited everything.  The article points out one big catch, though, you have a pretty basic choice when it comes to the devices – you’re not going to see a Blackberry, or probably any real smartphone for that matter, in the lineup.  You’re also probably not going to see high speed data service, and I wouldn’t bet on the coverage being the greatest – they’re essentially piggybacking on other cell towers through TracFone.  But, for $45, it’s really hard to beat for someone who needs very basic cell service.

So where are we headed in the future?  It’s going to get cheaper, and easier to use is where I see it going.  A couple months ago I got my preview invite for Google Voice, which is Google’s new, well, Voice service.  It has a bunch of features that are really tough to summarize, but it’s poised to be a game-changer for voice communication.  Some of the features are voicemail transcription/listening straight from your browser, free text messaging, assigning one number to multiple phones (I personally love this feature), and all kinds of things that are hard to summarize in a paragraph.  Best of all, you can do most everything straight from a web browser:

I’ve not used it a lot yet, mainly done some testing on my own, but from what I’ve seen it’s good – real good.  If they incorporated Skype-like functionality to allow you to actually make calls from the browser/application, well, it would be hard for me to use anything else.

All these things coupled with a new FCC that really seems to want to make an impact on the ridiculousness that cell carriers used to get away with means that the next two years are going to be very interesting for wireless voice communication.