[Jonovono]

Anyone know of alternatives?

I bought a jailbroken iPhone and have been just using a iPad sim card in it for the last little while. This way I pay about $10/month for enough data to get talk / text and the ability to surf the net a lot cheaper!

Edit: Or maybe I will still be able to do this once it is integrated with +.

[stanleydrew]

Which AT&T plan are you using? I'm about to write up an article about going data-only and could use some more reference plans besides T-Mobile's.

[Jonovono]

I am actually in Canada, so I use Bell (This is the plan: http://www.bell.ca/Mobility/Cell_phone_plans/iPad_data_plans...). I guess it's actually usually around $20 (sometimes I don't go over the 10MB plan if I am on Wifi lots). This is the best I could find for something in Canada.

Let me see that article when you are done! If I move to the US I'll be looking to try the same thing there.

Edit: I am looking at Bolt. Looks awesome. I hope in a few years phone numbers just don't exist. (well, abstracted out).

[stanleydrew]

Thanks for the link to Bell. We're adding a catalog of data-only plans around the world and tutorials about how to get them to the Bolt site.

And I agree about phone numbers. They should just be the IP addresses of communication. But nobody's developed a good-enough DNS equivalent (yet). We still all rely on a local cache of numbers in our phones' address books.

[Jonovono]

Cool! I have also heard of a few other related things:

http://www.fongo.com/ (And I thought there was another one out of the Waterloo area but can't find it, maybe it was this. )

http://www.freedompop.com/

https://angel.co/signal-mobile

Ya, exactly. When I meet someone. Why not be able to just start typing their name and add them that way. If they change their number it can be updated automatically so I have the new one.