Drop your iPhone data plan, keep voice

Sick of paying $20 a month for EDGE? Want to save $240/year? TUAW reader Josh tipped us off to his iPhone News post that reveals that you can now remove it from your plan. If you rarely use EDGE and live around ubiquitous WiFi (like I do), this is a great way to save some money.

I gave this a try myself but my GoPhone account didn't have the on-web option shown here. So I gave AT&T a call. It was, as always, an adventure and although I was told that you had to do this over their IBR IVR voice recognition system, I did find a service agent who was able to help me in person. (The IBR kept putting me in Spanish mode for some reason. Go figure.)

So as of my next billing cycle, my iPhone will now drop its EDGE/Data plan. This means I'm losing visual voicemail and EDGE access. Neither is a big deal for me. I can still check my voicemail by calling my iPhone on a landline, typing star (*) and entering my passcode. It also drops my monthly cost to $29.99/month--more than I want to be paying but not quite so much as before. I keep my AT&T account and, presumably, some level of Apple support and warranty service.

This option won't be of interest to those of you who pull down the big megabytes over EDGE but for us WiFi folks, it's fab.

Update: You may want to install Services.app, a program that allows you to disable EDGE while retaining calls and WiFi service.