[cooperadymas]

You'll find contract free plans are the way to go, especially if you're not interested in the latest smartphone. Virgin Mobile's plan is $35 for 300 minutes a month and unlimited text/data. (Looks like they just raised this from $25). You will be hard pressed to find a contract plan for that cheap, even without data. Virgin Mobile runs on Sprint's network, so you'll have the same coverage you would have with Sprint, with the exception of no roaming.

It's also becoming more and more difficult to find non-smartphones with the big contract companies.

[pacemkr]

Thanks for mentioning that it's Sprint. This answers my question further down the page.

Virgin might be it for me. I was looking at them before, but was traveling a bit at the time. Verizon was really the only option.

[18pfsmt]

I am considering moving to Virgin because of the data option, but I have done exactly what you describe you want to do 3 years ago. I currently use Straight Talk, which is sold by Wal-Mart, run by Carlos Slim's telco (he's _the_ telco player in Mexico), which uses Verizon's towers. I pay $33 including tax for 1000min/ 1000sms (200MB of data, but it's ~useless CDMA 1.x).

edit: I don't know if you want VOIP opinions (there so many options), but I use flowroute and am quite happy with their performance/ pricing.

[pacemkr]

I use Skype a lot, so that would probably be my goto voip provider. Assuming that they offer something like a landline.