Fresh from its victorious pummeling of Vonage, Verizon is now gunning for abusers of its “unlimited” EV-DO data services who use more than 5GB of bandwidth in a month.

Sounds like “any color you want as long as it’s black.”

According to the carrier’s user agreement, subscribers exceeding the limit are “presumed to be using the service in a manner prohibited” according to the service agreement and their service will be “terminated” immediately.

Verizon says that the data service can only be used for “(i)Internet browsing; (ii) email; and (iii) intranet access (including access to corporate intranets, email, and individual productivity applications like customer relationship management, sales force, and field service automation).” That excludes streaming audio and video (download and upload), podcasts, RSS feeds, online gaming just to name a few.

Takes your breath away. First you sign up for a pricey plan so you stay connected on-the-go. Then you find out that all you can do pretty much is read your email. That isn’t exactly the picture all the mobile apps evangelists have been painting for us.

The Nazis at Verizen don’t say anything about VoIP, but it’s not a stretch to imagine that it’s probably covered under “using a Data Plan or Feature in any manner prohibited above or whose usage adversely impacts our network or service levels.”

For more comment, read Ryan’s piece at Cybernetnews.

It’s beginning to sound quaint to call that gizmo we keep with us all the time a “telephone.” Maybe we should coin a new term for the ever-expanding universe of things we can do with it — perhaps Phone 2.0.

Now, in addition to getting directions and connecting with your Facebook buddies, you can connect your phone to the expanding universe of digital content with Cupertino, CA-based Navio’s content delivery system.

Navio is created from the consumer’s perspective.

For example, when you buy a DVD you can play it on a DVD player or your PC. You can lend it or share it. But when you buy digital content, it’s linked to a specific device — an iPod, PC, or TV. If you lose your hard drive, you lose all the songs, movies or anything else you’ve downloaded on it.

Navio has come up with a way that lets you preserve your right to content separately from the device you’re using it on. Instead of buying a physical file, you buy the “right” to it.

“It allows people to shop in a more normal way,” explains company COO Ray Schaaf.

That right goes into your “digital locker” — think of it as a virtual iPod that Navio maintains for you. You can use what you’ve bought — ringtones, wallpapers, songs, concert tickets, movie clips — on any device. Including your new disk drive.

The company says that this model gives consumers more flexibility while protecting artists and copyright holders.

“It allows distributed commerce. The right can be located and transacted anyplace,” says Julie Schenkman, Navio VP of Marketing. “It’s a real world model.”

The concept is getting traction. Navio has some marquee-quality customers including Walt Disney Internet Group, Music Choice, and Fox Sports. Now the company is expanding its customer base beyond content companies.

Today Navio announced a deal with Verizon that will let the carrier’s customers buy mobile content from Navio-powered Web and mobile storefronts. Content is delivered to the phone via SMS messaging and billed through Verizon. Customers need to have Verizon’s data service.

For media and entertainment companies, linking up with Navio instantly extends their potential market to the customers of the US second largest cellular carrier.

But why put this on a phone?

Distribution via the Web will always be important, but “the phone is a portable device and portable is the way it’s [the market’s] going,” explains Schaaf. “It’s something everyone uses, everyone carries around. A lot of promising opportunity centers around the cell phone. It’s much more personal, a one-to-one relationship.”

Next thing you know, you’ll be tuning in to YouTube on the phone. Oh, wait. That was announced last week.

You’re away from the office and discover you need an email address that’s in your desktop address book. But you can’t get it with the one device you do have with you — your cell phone.

Remoba of Santa Clara, CA thinks you should have another choice besides a PDA and a costly wireless data plan. The three-year-old company’s mission is to bring your desktop to your plain-jane ordinary, un-smart mobile phone.

Remoba offers a suite of applications that connect desktop applications like address books and calendars to cell phones without a mobile carrier’s data plan. Instead, the company’s service connects to your desktop using the air minutes you already pay for — the same way, for example, that you download your Ride of the Valkyrie ring tone.

In effect you get Blackberry capabilities with any CDMA or GSM phone. Remoba applications are offered through several mobile carriers in the U.S., South America and India. All are priced under US$10 per month.

One of the company’s offerings, RemoMail, is particularly handy. It lets you check and send your email from whatever cell phone and service plan you have today. It’s a quick fix for travelers who don’t need or want to deal with a Blackberry or other mobile email device and is priced proportionately at $1.99 a month.

RemoMail delivers email headers to your phone in batches of five at a time. You can decide if you need to read the entire message, delete it, or reply to it. You can connect to as many as seven different POP or IMAP email accounts.

RemoMail is most easily available right now through Verizon’s Get It Now program. You can also use the application with other carriers, although the configuration is a little more complicated. (Robinson promises to set me up with a Sprint version I can use on my Palm Treo, report to follow.)

This month Remoba launched its newest application, iPhonebook, which lets employees access corporate directories from their mobile phones. Especially useful for mobile workers, like sales reps, real estate agents, and general contractors, the service synchronizes information in both directions — from the desktop to the phone, and phone to the desktop.

For example, one iPhonebook client is a northern California construction company. iPhonebook gives the company’s crews all the contact information they need for customers, subcontractors and corporate contacts for each job.

“We deliver a company’s address book to anybody who’s mobile and needs their contacts to stay fresh,” says Remoba VP of Sales David Robinson.

“Most business people who are traveling don’t have all those different services available, for example, when they’re stuck in a plane for two hours, sitting on the tarmac,” explains Robinson. “But even if they have a candy bar phone with a mini keyboard, we make it into a tool they can use ‘right now’ to keep things moving.”

“We believe that the momentum is in this part of the market,” says Robinson. “Smart phones are only one percent of the market. But everybody needs better connectivity than they have now.”

Cable giant Comcast’s announcement today that it has hit the 1 million mark in “digital voice” customer subscribers won’t be construed as good news by the hundreds of “single-play” service providers that used to view Vonage and its $300 per customer marketing campaign as the New York Yankees (or Manchester United for you fans of real sport) of VoIP.

At first glance, it appears that yet another deep-pocketed entrant is trying to scoop up customers by spending millions in marketing — a hard act to compete against.

Perhaps, though, there’s a different way to view Comcast’s self-professed success, a way that shakes smaller VoIP players out of the no-win hole they have inadvertently dug for themselves.

The key is actually right in the Comcast marketing message, which I have now probably heard on the 24-hour news station my car radio appears to be stuck on about a thousand times. The message is simple: cable TV, internet access and unlimited telephone calls bundled together at $33 per service. The pitch is, of course, the technology (in the form of bundling), not the price.

There are plenty of players out there offering unlimited phone calls for about $20 a month, and they are having a tough time picking up more than a handful of new subscribers a week. Comcast is getting thousands and openly advertising a 65 percent price premium.

Is there something to be learned from this? Of course: technology trumps price.

And when it comes to technology, the smaller VoIP providers have a huge advantage over slow-moving dinosaurs like Comcast.

Unfortunately, it’s an advantage they don’t use out of misplaced fear.

Go to any of the established VoIP providers’ web pages and you’ll see they all say the same thing: “Save money.”

Go to the Cingular and Verizon pages and you’ll see a different message: “Get the latest toy.”

There are plenty of amazing toys for VoIP coming out daily, but you would never know it by hanging out on Vonage’s, BroadVoice or SunRocket’s pages. They try to sell you on price, which is a sure-loser of a tactic in a race to zero against wealthier foes.

To make matters worse, many of today’s smaller providers do everything in their power to discourage use of anything but the functionally limited analog device they send out to new customers. Use their device, hook up an old telephone to it, and that’s it. Don’t try to use your snazzy new WiFi phone, or, worse, connect to the service through powerful PBXes such as Asterisk or Communigate Pro. They don’t support it and are so paranoid of people actually using their service to make more than the average number of calls, they won’t even give you the basic information required to make it work.

When Jeff Pulver’s FWD service first started gaining traction (well before the kings of software and music piracy at Kazaa “invented” Skype as a proprietary FWD clone), the possibilities for VoIP seemed endless. Pulver envisioned a communications future shaped by innovation, creativity and community. Unfortunately, the service providers did everything in their power to stifle the fast-moving status-quo disrupting world Pulver and his band of early pioneers were helping to create.

Innovation? Too hard to support. Creativity? Takes too much time. Community? Where’s the money in that?

Now, if they want to survive, service providers need to go back to the pioneering ways. A major change in direction is in order. Stop packaging VoIP service as something that will save customers pennies a day and works exactly like their old phone does. The new approach needs to encourage the use of VoIP because it is infinitely more powerful than what we’ve used for 100 years.

We’ll use your service, we’ll even pay a bit more for it. But let us use it in the way we choose, with the device (or, even, multiple devices) we choose. New hardware or software comes on the market? Jump on it, don’t run away from it.

There’s a world of people out there ready to embrace change. This world’s the future of VoIP. And unless today’s service providers become part of it and soon, it will be Comcast’s world to rule.